This post is about one of the hotwirings of my brain. I thought of writing about this when I read Lubna’s post “Songs in the Memory”. Lubna was talking about how some songs relate her to places or events in her memory. Linking a song to an occurring event or a situation is an example of the use of our “Involuntary Memory”; a conception used to describe a condition where our brains store data and link them to a “sensual stimulus”, which can be an image, a smell, or simply a song!

This is a cool memory feature we have, but what happened to me and what I’ll be talking about here is a bit different …

A couple of years ago I was developing a Network Gaming System for a Network Games Place called Splash. It’s basically a login system that allows users to play games on the network for an amount of time they pay for. Guys who play network games should know very well what am talking about. The network system carries many other tasks as well, and is a very complex piece of software.


I started programming my network system like 5 years ago on my home PC. Being a network system, it had to be developed on a couple of computers at least, so as to test and experiment the features as they are programmed. Unluckily I had no other than my single computer and I had to program the whole product under virtual network configurations.

I sold the first copy of my system shortly before doing my IGCSE AS exams. After deployment, I began to realize that the system needed much more work than I ever thought it did. All the things that worked perfectly on my machine ran differently in the real network implementation. Serious problems started to arise; core features stopped working for unknown reasons and mysterious bugs appeared every now and then. The worst part of the problem was that the business already started to rely completely on my network system, there was no go back …

I got hundreds of calls from Splash staff at different times of the day and for months. Some calls came at nights before my IGCSE exams and were really freaky; “Mar7aba Ghaith, all our user accounts are gone”, “Ghaith; the system isn’t logging anybody off, everybody is playing for free”, “Ghaith, the server is down and it’s refusing to start again”.

When any of that used to happen, I’d hurry to take a taxi to the place and see what the problem is about, and then go back home, fix the problem, and come back to the place with a newer version of the software. I had no laptop and I couldn’t risk bringing the source code to the place, so this was my only possible course of action.

So anyway, during some of the most terrifying moments of my life, moments when the system came down and I was sweating at the server machine reviewing the logs to find a clue, the guys at Splash were playing songs from Fadel Shaker’s newest album “Seedi Roo7e”, which has been just released back then. They were enjoying the songs while I was freaking to death trying to fix the problems with the business owner over my head. My heart was beating soo fast while the songs played. I could hear every single musical note played alone because for me … time was freezing …

Today, it’s been a couple of years since I last rushed to Splash. I’ve sold two more copies of my network system to other network games places, and all of them are stable and rocking good! In fact, my network system is now the finest work in the local market with absolutely no competitor.

One peculiar phenomenon that I got out of this whole experience is that, till the day, my heartbeat rate increases instantly and uncontrollably every time I hear one the songs of “Seedi Roo7e” being played somewhere!

It sounds funny but it’s true. It’s a case of an unconscious learning behavior known as “Classical Conditioning” where an animal (me in this case :S) is taught to make a certain response to a stimulus by pairing this stimulus with another stimulus that is known to cause the response.

The physiologist Ivan Pavlov made a very famous experiment in this regard. He kept ringing a bell pre to presenting food to one of his dogs. Dogs usually salivate when they see or smell food, but Pavlov’s dog started to salivate at the sound of the bell itself!

You can see how Classical Conditioning is different from Involuntary Memory. The last links a stimulus to some collected memories, while the former links a stimulus to a behavior. Classical conditioning applies to us (humans) as much as it applies to animals even though we’re not aware of it; remember that the whole process takes place in the unconscious areas of our brains!

Still, if you think a bit about your daily activities, you can find many automatic reactions your body was classically conditioned to make in response to stimuli around. So next time you freak out when you hear your phone tone being played somewhere, you should know what that is about ;)