Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0454: Memorizing essential global geography

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

Gretchen is working on memorizing geography facts and asked about memorizing overall world geography. I go through the top global landmarks that I would recommend memorizing in order to make world geography an easy subject to learn. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by […]

Master of Memory 454. 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. Gretchen asked about memorizing essential global geography. She's been working on U.S. geography for a while and would soon like to move on to essential landmarks across the world. So what we're going to do to approach this issue is we'll use the approach that I

described in episode 447. And so that is picking coordinate points, picking cities, and learning those, and then the stuff in between will just fall in between easily. But what I've done is I've picked some landmark cities across the world based on a combination of the number of inhabitants, so I think the population makes a difference, and geographic distribution, because I want to pick cities that cover four or five different spots on each continent. So in essence, I have several cities that I'm going to list, where if you learn where these cities are, you can easily learn the stuff in between them, and you basically know the layout of pretty much the entire world. So first of all, let's start with North America. We have New York City, which is at 41 north, 74 west. How are you going to remember that it's at 41 north and 74 west? Well, you use your character in your PAO system for 41, and then you use the action and object for 74. So for me, Rita, who is an ambulance driver and represents the number 41, is getting her finger stuck in a gear that's turning.

So there's a turning gear, and she has her finger stuck in it. And that image there of that ambulance driver with her finger stuck in a gear tells me 4174. Now I'll remember since New York City is obviously in North America, that it's 41 North, 74 West. And so that's it. I'll just associate that with New York City. And I now know where New York City is in the world. Next, we have Los Angeles, which is 34 North, 118 West. That's on the opposite end of the U.S. Then we have Chicago, which is 42 north, 88 west, kind of in the middle of the top there. And then Mexico City, which is 19 north and 99 west. Those four cities give you a sort of outline or at least a skeleton on which you can base the rest of North America. Admittedly, we don't have much that's north of Chicago. With Chicago,

they're kind of on the line between the US and Canada. We don't have anything in Canada or Alaska, but that's because the cities up there aren't very populated. And as you go further north, it becomes very unpopulated. I also haven't included Antarctica in this project because I'm focusing on the more populated areas of the world. But you will find that if you've drawn North America once or twice and you know exactly where these cities are, you'll find it pretty easy to draw Alaska and Canada in context. Next, going south in Central America, I've chosen Guatemala City, which is by far the most populated city in Central America. And its coordinates that you want to memorize are 15 north, 91 west.

Going further down, we have Bogota, Colombia, which is 5 north, 74 west. We have Lima, Peru, which is 12 south, 77 west. We have Sao Paulo, Brazil, which is 24 south, 47 west. And then we have Santiago, Chile, which is 33 south, 71 west. Now, just a second, let's stop. Those are five cities. If you memorize those coordinates, you can draw out where those cities are on a piece of graph paper, or eventually, after having done that a couple of times, you can easily place those cities on a blank piece of paper. And then, knowing the outlines of the continents, you can draw all of the continents of the Western Hemisphere around those cities quite accurately, actually. And not only that, if you learn another city in the Americas, you can easily see where that is based on whether it's north or south of the other cities and things like that.

For example, if you wanted to put San Francisco or Seattle on your map, you would know that that's near Los Angeles, but north of it. And then if you wanted to put Buenos Aires on your map, you would know that that's near Santiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, but a little southeast. All right, so let's go over to Europe now, and we have five cities from Europe. First of all, London of the UK is 52 north and zero west, and there's a reason for that. Then we have Madrid, Spain going a little southwest, so we have 40 north, 4 west. And then going back east, we have Rome, Italy, which is 42 north and 13 east. We have Berlin, Germany, which is 53 north, 13 east. And we have Moscow, Russia, which is 56 north, 13 east, and we have Moscow, Russia, which is 56 north, 38 east.

You learn where those cities are, and you can learn all of your countries in Europe, or all the major countries pretty easily, and eventually all the smaller countries relative to those, because you have a nice sort of outline of the five biggest cities in Europe. Note that once again, we've stopped before going north to Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and that's just because of the very low population up there. There aren't cities big enough really to register on the list of highly populated cities, but again if you learn how to draw the rest of Europe from knowing where the UK is, where Spain is, where Italy is, where Russia is, where Germany is, then if you've seen a map and you've copied and drawn a map

of all of Europe, including Norway, Sweden, and Finland, then you can do that from memory relative to the points that we already have. One way or another we're focusing on the very highly populated areas of the world and the rest again will fit in between these landmarks. Okay, now before going over to Asia, let's go south to Africa. We have Cairo, Egypt, which is 30 north, 31 east. We have Lagos, Nigeria, on the opposite side of the continent, which is 6 north and 3 east. We have Mogadishu, Somalia, which is 2 north, 45 east. We have Kinshasa of the Congo, which is 4 south, 15 east. And then we have Johannesburg, South Africa, which is 26 south, 28 east.

Africa is an enormous continent, and if you just get these five cities right, you can start to put together the immense project of learning all the cities and the countries in Africa. Now let's go over across the Indian Ocean to the sort of Australia-Indonesia realm. And we'll start with the Philippines, which is furthest north, at 15 north, 121 east. That's where Manila is, an enormous city in the Philippines. We have Jakarta, Indonesia, 9 million people in that city in Indonesia, 6 south, 107 east. Then we have Perth, Australia, on the west coast, which is 32 south, 107 east. Then we have Perth, Australia on the west coast, which is 32 south, 116 east. And then Sydney on the east coast at 34 south, 151 east. Next, we'll go all the way southeast to Auckland, New Zealand, which is 37 south and 175 east. All right, now finally we'll go back up and cover the most populated continent

in the world, Asia. We have Mumbai, India at 19 north, 73 east. We have Karachi, Pakistan nearby at 25 north, 67 east. We have Shanghai, China at 31 north, 122 east. And it was really hard to pick cities in China because about half of the most populated cities in the world are in China. But I chose Shanghai because there are so many people and because it's not close to the next two cities that I'm going to mention, or it's not as close, which are Seoul, South Korea at 38 north, 127 east, and Tokyo, Japan at 36 north, 140 east. So that little region up there around Shanghai, Seoul, and Tokyo is one of the very, very highly populated regions of the world, and learning where those three cities are in relation to each other gives you some context for other regions around there. All right, now after this process of learning all of these cities,

you'll be able to look at a globe and suddenly understand where everything is. Even if you didn't memorize those coordinates, you just went to a globe and just went and identified those countries and got to know their surroundings a little bit. Suddenly, if I give you any point on the globe, any new city, new country, or other landmark that you hear about, it's going to fall onto your mental map in a place that you understand. It'll have a context. And that's all because of the exclusivity principle of focusing on this little skeleton of just a few landmark

cities throughout each continent. Now, this principle of exclusivity and of focusing on the most essentials is one of the things that really excites me because it leverages as little as possible to get even better learning results than we would if we just tried to learn everything. So this is something that I'm really passionate about. And I love geography. Augustine said that the world is a book and he who does not travel reads only one page. So I do really, I'm a huge fan of travel and I want to go to all of these cities. But the fact is that, I mean, just learning about them and learning where they are and things like that at least lets you start to read the book before you actually travel to these places. And that's really exciting. All listeners, make sure to go to masterofmemory.com slash Mandarin to see

how you can support the show, not necessarily with money, but just by spreading the word about what we're doing over there. It's something really landmark and new. And 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.