On Saul Steinberg’s legendary 1976 New Yorker cover depicting a world map, Manhattan takes up the entire bottom half while the rest of the world is squished onto the top.
It’s a distortion of reality as are nearly all maps — including the ones inside of our heads, according to Rebecca Schwarzlose’s enlightening and ambitious new book, “Brainscapes.”
In an “exquisite choreography” orchestrated by genes and the environment, our billions of brain cells create all kinds of spatial representations. “What you ultimately see,” she writes, “is warped by your brain maps.” Same for hearing and touching and smelling and even remembering. The distortion inherent in these maps helps us work our way through the sensory overload that reality presents us with every day.
