Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0494: How to memorize rivers

Episode Date: January 28, 2016

Gretchen asks about memorizing rivers. Since rivers are so complicated, how do you remember how they run, especially when they establish multiple territorial borders? 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 494. 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 said in an email, I'm excited about the new format for Master of Memory. Maybe you're already covering this, but for geography, I hope you have some tips for learning major rivers and borderlines

of countries like I did this afternoon, something that really excites me. But that actually leads me to a little comment here. Always make sure that you give a theory a little bit of practice before you make it a standard part of a system or recommend it to other people or something like that. I actually completely changed this episode based on, or not completely changed it, but largely changed this episode based on an approach that I was going to use. I changed it because I tried it out on one or two of the world's largest rivers, and it really didn't hold up. So what I was going to do was answer that you should focus on, you know, putting a river on a continent in

your mind and then putting other things on either side of the river in the continent. But the fact is that with as many, you know, tributaries as rivers have, I've decided to focus more on drainage basins than on simply dividing territories using the rivers, even though that's largely what rivers function to do in the end, as Gretchen mentioned. So rivers do have this tendency to divide things on either side of them, but if you look at the maps of rivers, then you'll see that one very nice thing that they tend to do is, at least if it's a major river, you're actually establishing a major area of a continent. So if you focus on major rivers, obviously they never cross each other, although you have all the tributaries joining to form bigger rivers. And so if you focus on those bigger rivers, the smaller rivers will

always lead to those bigger rivers. And then you're establishing separate drainage basins. For example, in South America, if you combine the region that the Amazon River, you know, occupies, including its drainage basin, and then the area of the drainage basin of Rio de la Plata, that river, the two basins together form most of the continent of South America. So what I suggest doing to study rivers is to choose a primary route of a river,

or choose, you know, one main route, or a tributary leading to the main river, and then choose the most significant tributaries after that to focus on, but first just focus on that main route. So this is very much like, as I've described in other episodes, choosing major avenues of a city and then learning smaller and smaller avenues and streets after that. But in some ways, doing that with a city is only sort of an analogy for what we're doing with the rivers, because these rivers really do always lead from the smaller ones to the bigger ones. And the bigger ones are clearly the more important. So it's like having a living mind map right in front of us on a continent. We have that river with the main idea and the smaller ideas branching out from it. It really struck me as odd that this river thing is more like the street tactic that I've talked about than the street tactic itself, and if something is more like something than the thing itself,

I don't know, that's a little bit weird. But one way or another, I'll use an example. And my example is going to be the largest river in the world, which is the Amazon River. And so this exercise would be, it's actually something you have to do with a map and then ideally with a piece of paper as well. But what I'd like you to do is to learn to draw the Amazon River, or at least one tributary of the Amazon River leading to the main river.

And so we're simplifying the whole river to one stream and then reducing that stream to a series of landmarks. So I would suggest that you, if possible, maybe you pause this episode and get a map and then follow along. We're actually going to start with the Putumayo River, which is on the border between Colombia and Ecuador. There actually is a larger tributary, but I've chosen to until you get to the three-way border between Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. So you'll notice where that landmark is, and then you'll continue drawing the river until you find the next landmark after a bit of Peru, which is at Flor de Agosto, which is where the river kind of turns from going south to going east. And then there's a bit more Peru until you get to the border where Peru ends, and then where the river is just going through Colombia for a very short distance, just about 20 miles. The next landmark is where this river enters Brazil, and this is where things get serious. Our next landmark is at Santo Antônio de, well, actually, I don't know how this was pronounced in Brazilian Portuguese, but it's Santo Antônio do Iça, I think.

And that's a little landmark there where it joins with a larger tributary that we chose not to use, which is the Rio Salimos or something like that. And so I don't know my Portuguese, but that's basically what the river is. You'll see it on the map there if you're studying the rivers. The next landmark will be, and so the river is pretty big at this point, and it's called the Rio Salimos or whatever it is, because it changed names to match the larger tributary where they've joined there. Then you'll continue along, and the next landmark will be at Tefe, where this one joins with the Japura River, but it continues to go by the name of Rio Salimos because that one's bigger. It just wins out. The next landmark is a huge one. This is Manaus, and this is a really good-sized city. This is where the Rio Salimos joins with the Rio Negro

and finally becomes the Amazon River. And so I would say that this is probably the second most important landmark on the whole map, aside from our last one, which you'll hear in just a couple more. So the next landmark is Santarem, which is just, you'll see on the map why that's a significant landmark. There's a city there, and it's just a nice place to have on the map. Then you have where the river is joined by the Rio Cinco, and there are a lot of small towns along there where the two are joining each other. The river is enormous at this point,

but there aren't any really significant towns that I could pull up or any cities that I could use as a main landmark. So it's just the joint there between the Amazon River and the Rio Cinco. And then finally, our last landmark is Macapa, where the Amazon discharges into the Atlantic. So what you're going to do after just looking along the map at those rivers is really try to get to a point where you can draw all of that from memory, including labeling those landmarks

if possible. And then I would suggest going ahead and exploring a map further for nearby large cities and all of the major tributaries and what cities are connected to those. So we're going out from this main idea of the Amazon and this, you know, one route that we've reduced it to and seeing how things expand from there. We're making use of the tactic of exclusivity just to reduce our knowledge to something that's very easy to accomplish here. And then you can really learn an enormous part of South America with all of its cities and all of its geography, just from having learned this one part of the Amazon that we'll be branching out from. Thanks so much for the question, Gretchen. I really enjoy these questions

about geography, and so that's why I've devoted Thursdays to these. Tomorrow, it's Open Mic Friday, so I'm going to be addressing a question about review tactics, and that's going to be interesting. If you have any questions about geography or any accelerated learning questions, just let me know. Just leave your question at masterofmemory.com slash question. I'll be happy to address it on the show or get to you by email. Or if you just want to learn more about accelerated learning in general and how to make these tactics work for you, make sure to go to masterofmemory.com slash start for a complete free starter guide on using mnemonics and accelerated learning. 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.