The cerebral cortex is the part in your brain that is responsible for intellectual skills.  The intellectual skills include logical abilities, identifying lines, colors, numbers, words, day dreaming, rhythm and spatial sound differentiation (this is what makes you appreciate Dolby and THX sound effects). These get categorized into the visual or the auditory senses accordingly. The visual sense is so powerful that most of the association happens through this.  For those who are visually impaired, the other senses become sharper and powerful and usually it is the auditory sense that gets in charge. So how does the brain associate? Brain constantly learns once you are born. And it learns consciously and unconsciously.

All the intellectual information helps in building shape, structure, look and feel, composture, the feeling of everything you come across life.  These information are linked like a foreign key relationship to the primary object in focus. It is an extremely powerful relational management and fetching of information is so fast and amazing that you cant even think of super computers performing that fast.  So Mind Maps is all about utilizing this amazing association capability that is built in in you which you never realized and used it to maximum.  Mind maps are for anyone who wants to utilize this powerful feature and is not restricted by cast, creed, religion, sex or where you belong.