Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0499: How to memorize the coordinates of cities

Episode Date: February 4, 2016

How do you remember where the biggest and most important cities in the world are located? In this episode I talk about the value of memorizing the coordinates of major cities, and I present sample mnemonics for memorizing the coordinates of the 10 largest cities in the Americas. What do you want to learn? Leave your question […]

Master of Memory 499 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. I've talked a lot before about the value of memorizing the coordinates of cities, particularly large cities across the world. You can spend a long time trying to learn and memorize country borders only to have them change in some large event, or you can spend just a few minutes

learning the coordinates of the biggest cities and where they're located, and they basically never move. Plus, you can understand country borders and things like that much better when you understand where people are congregated, because in my mind, geography is about where people are, and nothing says that better than cities. Now, another advantage is that this, when you combine it with looking at a globe to see where those coordinates are, because that's what coordinates are about, it forces you to think in global terms of the way that the world is actually shaped instead of using a map, which is always distorted in some way. For example, you'll realize in this exercise that South America is actually almost entirely east of North America in terms of

longitude. This didn't really dawn on me myself until I went to South America, but you kind of realize that type of thing if you actually look at the longitude lines or just mess with clashing time zones in trying to call South America and realizing they're almost as close to Europe or Africa as they are to North America in terms of time zones. Now what I'm going to do in this episode is present my own mnemonics for learning the coordinates of the top 10 largest cities in the Americas. So we're only sticking with the Western Hemisphere. And incidentally, most of the largest cities are in South America. So what we're going to do is we're going to work from east to west. So we'll jump up and down quite a bit. But I would encourage you, even if you're not going to

internalize these mnemonics at all, at least, if possible, to pull out a globe and look at the cities just to see where they are, because it's really enlightening just to see where people are congregated throughout the Americas. Now, the way my mnemonics work is I use a character for the latitude and I use an object for the longitude. So I imagine that a character is in a city with a particular object. So for example, the furthest east city that we have is Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And in this city, my character is Naomi, who is a hen, and she's a bit goofy. And to make things worse, she has some alcohol with her. She has some rum. And so the hen is 23 for 23 South, and she goes all the way around the world, but she always stays at 23 South.

And when she's at 43 West, she has her alcohol, she has her rum, and she's in Rio de Janeiro, which is a place that is, by all accounts that I've heard, a great place to party. Next is Sao Paulo at 24 south, 47 west, very close to Rio de Janeiro in the grand scheme of things. And Sao Paulo is, incidentally, the biggest of all the cities in the Americas. In fact, only two U.S. cities even make this list, and they're pretty far down in the grand scheme of things. So anyway, Sao Paulo is, well, the character is 24, which is Winner, the name of a clownfish. And he's in Sao Paulo with a rake. So he's in there trying to bring order to the city and it's not going to work at all

because it's such a huge metropolitan city with enormous buildings, significantly bigger than New York. So he might be just coming in here trying to bring order to this crazy big city. So that's winner with a rake. So of course that's 24 south and then 47 west. Now you might be wondering how I know it's south and west, and that's because I know that Brazil

is southwest. I mean, that's basically, you know, all of this is a combination of learning the numbers and this memorization stuff and actually also looking at the map and seeing where things are in relation to each other. So you'll know pretty well what is south and what is north and things like that if you're thinking in terms of the globe. Our next city is Buenos Aires. It's one of, it's the smallest of the 10, but it's the next one in terms of going west. So here we're at all the way down at 35 south and then at 58 west. So the character is Emil, who is a butterfly, and then 58 west is represented by a life jacket. So here's the butterfly in a life jacket. And what I associate Buenos Aires with in general and culturally and globally, this is how it's associated, is with tango. So if you're thinking about dancing tango and you're thinking about a butterfly putting on its life jacket to try to dance tango, that's pretty much your, you know, it's pretty ridiculous,

but that's what the butterfly is trying to do. It's trying to tango in a life jacket, and it's not working out very well. So, but that's the image. And that reminds me of, you know, 35 and 58 when I think of Buenos Aires. Next, we'll have Caracas in Venezuela. And the mnemonic will involve my character for 11, because we're 11 north. This one's actually north. And so we're 11 north, which for me is a very vain woman named Deity. And what she has with her is a piece of chalk. And so I can, in my mind, I can easily associate Caracas with her carrying a piece of chalk based on my impression of Venezuela

and of Caracas. So there she is. She has her chalk and she's drawing on the city of Caracas. And then next we have Santiago, which is in Chile on the west side or the west coast, further south like Buenos Aires. So we're down south again. And the character is 33, which for me is a bird of paradise.

And then what the bird of paradise has is a kite. This bird of paradise is flying a kite and and everything's cool, and it's really nice. And Santiago is, well, theoretically, Chile is basically the most developed country of South America. And Santiago is high on my list of cities that I'd really like to visit in South America. And so I'm, I can easily make that association between the bird of paradise and flying that kite in Santiago. Next, Bogota, which is another city on my list. And that one is 5 north and 74 west. So my character is Sally, a ladybug, for the 5 north.

And then the 74 west is a gear. And this is kind of interesting. I think of Colombia as the entrance to South America from Central and North America. And so if you think of a gear slowly pushing people in, and you also think of ladybugs as appearing and disappearing based on the different seasons, you think of people moving between continents. So that's my idea there, that that's the ladybug and the gear and so i remember five north and 74 west next going further west we have new york city in north america obviously and so we have 41 north and then also 74 west and just think about that columbia is the entrance to south america and new york is obviously

on the east coast of the u.s so again south america is east of the u.s in terms of longitude so we have new york city is 41 north and my character is rita sort of a police officer and then 74 again is a gear. So things run pretty well in New York City, relatively well. I mean, compare it with a lot of other cities and things run okay. And then you also think of the New York police, and so that's a pretty easy association to make. Next we have Lima, which is our furthest west city in South America, at 77 west. And the character is 12. So we're 12 south in Peru. The character is a great Dane.

So his name is Dan. And he's very vain and kind of proper. And what he has is a cake. And I kind of think of Peru as an interesting place to go, although I don't know much about the culture. And I don't know, I can associate that with Dan and the cake pretty well. And so that's the association that I'm making there. Next, we're going up to Mexico City, which is 19 north and 99 west, very far west from the 77 west where we were in Lima. So Mexico City is 19 north. My character for 19 is Debbie, a kangaroo. And to be 99 west,

she's smoking a pipe. And Debbie normally would not do that, but I can imagine her doing it in Mexico City if that's where she happened to be. Next, we're in Los Angeles. And so this is 34 north, which for me is a betta fish. 34 is a betta fish named Amore. And he's 34 north in Los Angeles and 118 west. Now, I'm going to be able to remember the 118 because I know that Los Angeles is further west than New York, of course. And so 118 West, the object is going to be toffee. And we have this betta fish in toffee. And I'm able to associate that pretty well with LA. I can create my own

kind of personal association with that. So yeah, that's my process for memorizing the coordinates of cities. And one thing that you can do in an exercise I really like is actually taking out a piece of graph paper and plotting the points of these cities and then trying to draw the continents around them. Again, it's really enlightening and very enriching to know where you are in terms of distance from other cities and where other cities are in distance from each other. It also gives you such a nice skeleton around which to base lots of other things like where countries are and how the continents are shaped and all sorts of things like that. Now, the next episode is episode 500.

And in that episode, I'm going to provide a highly demanded resource, and it will be by far the biggest and most thorough podcast episode I've ever created. So stay tuned, and I'll be back at you again with a beast of a resource in episode 500 of Master of Memory.