You think you know geography. Then you sit down at a keyboard with a blank map staring at you, and suddenly, every city you’ve ever visited or read about evaporates. It's a weird kind of stage fright. Most people, when asked to name as many cities as you can, start strong with the heavy hitters—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo—and then hit a literal brick wall around city number forty. Why?
It isn't just because you're "bad at maps." There is a fascinating psychological tug-of-war happening between your long-term memory and your brain's retrieval system. We navigate the world through "cognitive maps," but those maps are messy. They aren't organized like an alphabetical list; they're clustered by emotion, travel history, and, strangely enough, sports teams or movie settings.
The 5-Minute Brain Freeze
Honestly, if you try this right now, you'll probably notice a pattern. You’ll name five cities in your home state, then jump to the capital of a country you visited three years ago. Your brain works in clusters. Once you exhaust the "California cluster" (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose), your neurons have to physically "travel" to a new network to find more names. This transition is where most people quit.
According to research into spatial navigation and memory, like the studies coming out of the University of Chicago, our brains encode places based on "place fields." These are specific neurons that fire only when we think about or occupy a certain location. If you haven't thought about Lagos, Nigeria, or Chongqing, China, in a while, those place fields are essentially dormant. They aren't "deleted," but the path to find them is overgrown with mental weeds.
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The Statistical Reality of Global Cities
So, how many cities are actually out there for you to find? It depends on who you ask. The United Nations usually tracks "urban agglomerations." As of 2026, there are over 12,000 cities worldwide with populations of at least 50,000.
If you lower the bar to "any populated place," the number explodes. Some databases, like Simplemaps, track over 4.3 million unique towns and cities. You could spend your entire life typing names and you wouldn't even scratch the surface of 1%.
The Heavyweights You Probably Missed
When people try to name as many cities as you can, they almost always ignore the fastest-growing regions on Earth. Most Westerners can name ten cities in Europe before they can name three in Africa, despite the fact that Africa is home to some of the most massive megacities in existence.
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- Kinshasa (DRC): Currently sitting at over 18 million people. It's bigger than Paris or London, yet it rarely makes it onto a casual "city name" list.
- Dhaka (Bangladesh): One of the most densely populated places on the planet.
- Chongqing (China): It’s a municipality the size of Austria. It has a population of over 30 million, but if you ask a random person in a coffee shop to name a Chinese city, they’ll say "Beijing" and then stop.
How to Actually Win at City Naming Games
If you're playing a game like CityQuiz.io or JetPunk, you need a strategy. You can't just hunt-and-peck. The pros—the people who can name 800+ cities in twenty minutes—use a technique called Regional Chaining.
Basically, they don't think "What's another city?" They think "What's the next city along this coastline?"
They'll start at Seattle and work their way down the I-5 corridor: Tacoma, Portland, Salem, Eugene, Medford, Redding, Sacramento... you get the idea. By following a physical path, you're using your brain’s spatial memory rather than its semantic memory. It’s a lot easier to remember where things are than what they are named.
Another trick? Think about the "Shadow Cities." For every famous city, there is a neighbor. If you type Dallas, you should immediately type Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, and Irving. If you type Miami, you better follow up with Fort Lauderdale and Hialeah. These "satellite cities" are the secret to boosting your count without needing a PhD in Geography.
Why We Get Stuck on Capitals
There's a cognitive bias where we equate "importance" with "recall." We memorize capitals because we're told they matter. But often, the capital isn't even the biggest or most recognizable city. Think about Australia. Everyone knows Sydney and Melbourne, but people regularly forget Canberra is the actual capital. In Switzerland, it's Bern, but your brain wants to say Zurich or Geneva.
The Psychology of the "Almost" Name
You know that feeling? It's on the tip of your tongue. You can see the harbor, you can see the bridge, you know they have a famous soccer team, but the name is just... gone. This is called the Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) state. It happens because your brain has successfully accessed the concept of the city (the "lemma") but hasn't yet triggered the sound of the word (the "phonology").
In geography games, this is a killer. The best thing you can do is move on. If you stare at the screen trying to remember that one city in northern Italy, you're wasting the cognitive energy you could be using to list twenty cities in Brazil.
Actionable Steps to Expand Your Mental Map
If you genuinely want to get better at this—maybe for a pub quiz or just to satisfy your own curiosity—stop looking at lists. Lists are boring and hard to memorize. Instead, try these three things:
- Use Satellite Mode: Spend ten minutes a week on Google Earth. Zoom in on a region you know nothing about, like Central Asia or West Africa. Look at the names of the cities. Seeing the physical layout helps your brain anchor the name to a "place field" much better than a text list ever will.
- Follow the Sports: If you're into global sports (Premier League, IPL, NBA), use the team locations. It's a massive cheat code for naming medium-sized cities like Wolverhampton, Ahmedabad, or Milwaukee.
- The "Border Walk": Pick a country and name the cities that sit right on the border. It’s a specific mental trigger that often bypasses the usual "I can't think of anything" block.
The reality is that our world is becoming more urbanized every second. By the time you finish reading this, a few hundred more people have moved into the outskirts of Lagos or Delhi. Your mental map is a living thing. It needs updating.
To truly master the challenge to name as many cities as you can, you have to stop treating geography like a school subject and start treating it like a travel itinerary. Next time you're bored, pick a random point on a map and see if you can "walk" your way to the nearest ocean using only city names. It's harder than it sounds, but it's the best way to make sure you never hit that 50-city wall again.
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Start your next session by focusing on one specific continent you usually ignore, like South America or Africa, to break your brain out of its usual North American/European loops.