Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0447: How to draw the world from memory

Episode Date: November 24, 2015

Mike asks about how to draw the world from memory, including continents and landmarks. I describe a method for memorizing coordinates, and which points to focus on for the most efficient memorization results. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 447. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today's question is from Mike. Hi Timothy. I just want to thank you for your show and tell you it's really helping me and my family change the way we learn. We're using it, for example, to build a PAO system that our entire family can use. So it's a G-rated PAO

system, and we're using that for Bible verses, history, and other number-related things. Your podcasts have been helping us avoid rework and stay organized and get some other good ideas. So thank you for that. I have two questions, and I'm hoping to break them up into two separate recordings. The short question is related to episode nine of your show, where you mentioned how you memorized coordinates so that you could draw the continents in correct proportion. Assuming we wanted to do this not just for the continents, but the countries, how would you go about it? I mentioned the PAO system so that you could incorporate that into the solution if it's applicable. As a bonus feature, if we wanted to place the capitals and other landmarks in the right places,

how would you later layer that onto the map, the mental map, I guess we would call it. The end goal is not only to be able to draw this, but hopefully to be able to pull the map up mentally when having geography lessons or destinations in mind. First of all, Mike, thanks so much for the question and for the kind words. Now, what I recommend that you do in order to remember all of this stuff is that you actually start, first of all, with landmarks and think in terms of landmarks. So back in the episode where I talked about memorizing the shapes of the continents, the way that I did that was I was just memorizing certain coordinate points where there were landmark changes in the land around the outlines of the continents. When you go beyond the continents, I've actually sort of changed my own approach to remembering geography, and I actually remember things in terms of cities these days instead of in terms of countries. And there are several reasons for that, one of which is simply that when you remember a city and you happen to know what country it's in,

it's pretty easy to remember the country around that city. But also, it's really how civilization has worked ever since cities started being built thousands and thousands of years ago. We congregate in cities, and those are our major landmarks and cultural centers. And even when country boundaries change, which they do over time in pretty much every significant war, some country boundary changes or some territory boundary changes or something like that, the fact is that cities don't move, they're just there. So you're learning timeless information essentially in learning where cities are. In fact, personally I would actually recommend learning the coordinates of cities before learning the outlines of the continents. So going a little bit

backwards from what I may have said before way back early on learning the outlines of the continents. So going a little bit backwards from what I may have said before, way back early on in the days of Master of Memory where I was starting and talking about how I memorized the outlines of the continents, I would learn the cities first, and then it's fairly easy to draw the continents around those cities. We're leveraging the small amount of memorization possible. And so, for example, to learn the outline of the U.S., I would recommend learning the coordinates for New York and Washington, D.C. on the East Coast, or maybe New York and Boston, whichever you choose. San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West Coast. Houston and Miami down south in Texas and Florida. And then Chicago and Minneapolis on the north edge of the U.S. Learn the coordinates for those and be able to draw those. First of all, just memorize the

coordinates and be able to look at a map and see where they are in relation to the outline of the country. And then take an outline map of the U.S. that has lines for coordinates and draw the cities on the outline map. So you just take a blank map of the U.S. with no state lines, no anything except just the outline and maybe some coordinate lines, and see if you can write down or draw where the cities are on that map. Next, on a blank piece of graph paper, this is kind of the third step in this process, first draw where the cities are in the coordinates, and then draw an outline of the U.S. around those cities. And you'll find that you're drawing a fairly accurate outline of the U.S. Then fourth, try drawing just an

outline of the U.S. while simply imagining where the cities are. So you get a blank piece of graph paper out and just draw a blank outline of the U.S. imagining where the cities are. You'll find that just from memorizing these eight cities and where they are, you've had a lot more information stick along with it. The shape and proportions of the country have just kind of automatically been absorbed along with these significant details of where these major cultural centers are, where cities and other landmarks are when you go down into more details. So yeah, that's how I would do it. I would start with cities first, and you'll find

that you'll learn a lot more information more efficiently if you just memorize those few points, those few landmarks, and the information around it is pretty much naturally absorbed as long as you just try it out a couple of times. Thanks again for the great question, Mike. And for all listeners, I would encourage you to go to masterofmemory.com slash vote and see how you can support the show by checking out our Mandarin project. We have a Kickstarter project with a very ambitious goal to raise $12,000 by December 18.

This would be a huge milestone achievement for Master of Memory if we can get this funded and use it to create a Mandarin course in a very short time frame as opposed to the two years that we've been working on the Spanish course. And then that'll just kickstart us to be able to work and put more focus onto other projects like courses for geography, for history, and for memorizing poetry, getting that course released, everything that we've been working toward doing for a very long time. This will just get us a little bit of a head start on what we're doing and accelerate our process. Again, that's just masterofmemory.com slash vote and whatever the progress of Master of Memory is

worth to you. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.