Mental Map Oversimplification (MMO) is a real thing, but it might be overstating things to say people “suffer” from it. MMO is the tendency to think of geographic names and terms as straightforward, when real places on earth do not follow linguistic shortcuts and borders are not simply straight lines.
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Americans tend to think of Canada as “the North” (and so do Canadians), but geographically, more than 60% of Canadians live south of Seattle. In fact, the most southern part of Canada is at the same latitude as California! We also look at South America as “south” when it’s also very much east of North America. Brazil is much closer to Africa than it is to the US, but that’s hard to visualize because of Brazil’s continent’s name. And you might not realize that Chicago, Illinois, and Rome, Italy, are at the same latitude. Well, Rome is very slightly further north. The local climate of those cities make that hard to believe.
Read more mind-blowing examples of MMO at Atlas Obscura. You’ll start to look at maps in a whole new way.
(Image credit: Victoria Ellis)
Source: neatorama