This American Life- Mapping Senses- Analysis

The episode of This American Life. “Mapping Senses” describes the different ways people have devised to map their surroundings using senses. Each person focused on in the podcast has chosen one sense that they used for their mapping. While these experiences of the senses are being mapped out in a way that other people can hear or see or understand them, each of the maps created are of the individuals experiences alone.

Denis Wood, who maps his neighborhood through nontraditional marks is mapping his neighborhood through his own sense of sight and what he sees. His ideas of what to map are completely different than what other people might find important in a visit to the neighborhood. His maps are of things he, and he alone, experiences in that particular way. Wood is the person who collects the data for his map, so it is up to his own experiences to make the maps accurate and his decisions of what does or does not belong in the parameters for each subject that he has chosen.

Tom Lester, who maps the ambient sounds of his own environment also maps his senses in a way that are reliant on his experiences alone. He matches the sounds of the humming and beeping of his environments with a keyboard and then looks to other theories to try to assign meaning to them. His theory of the effect that a minor cord, created by the ambient noise may effect a person's mood comes from perhaps his own personal experiences with being in an environment with such ambient noise. However his theory seems based only on a bit of knowledge of music theory and his own experience with ambient noise, and nothing else. Making his mapping of what he hears a personal experience that may not be the same to anyone else.

The mapper of the sense of touch, Deb Monroe, feels the need to check her body for defects, such as lumps in her breasts, constantly. While others may see her as just a hypochondriac who, when she gets stressed out, feels the need to check for cancers, some see her as a person who is mapping her own body. To me, her personal experiences with the way her stressed out mind deals with anxiety and fear is a way to map her feelings, although it is an unusual and hard to understand way. But she is still mapping her body in a way that only she can understand and keep track of.

Jonathan Gold maps a street in Los Angeles in a way that only he can remember and experience. By using his sense of taste to sample all the food served in this small area he has chosen, he can certainly describe what he is experiencing and his thoughts on it but it is his experience alone. Just as one person can experience the taste of fish and find it delicious while another person is disgusted by the same taste. Gold can identify each location by his memory of the tastes he experienced in their food but it is his memory and experience alone that gives it meaning to him and him alone.