mapping the senses

this weekend's episode of this american life focused on maps and mapping but the meaning of mapping was extended beyond the usual geographical confines to cover all the five senses. Each act, five in all, covered sight, smell, sound, taste and touch respectively. for the first sense (in some sense, the only one which made sense and was not overly contrived), they had a guy in NC making neighbourhood maps of anything you can imagine- houses with Halloween pumpkin, pattern of light falling through the leaves, houses with people featured on local papers, criss-crossing patterns of cable and utility line maps- basically stretching the definition and purpose of cartography to an artistic sensibility driven creative process. it was no longer mundane, in the true sense of the Latin root meaning world. the other acts were interesting but to call them mapping was a stretch. an electronic nose, a hypochondriacal woman who obsessively palpates her breasts, a chap who

i can see a sequel to this episode covering just the brain. after all these senses do not make, um sense, without the brain. starting from the homunculus which maps the body parts onto the somatosensory and motor cortical regions of the brain to the recent obsession with fMRI based brain mapping.