There's this scene in Finding Forrester where Sean Connery marks up a manuscript with the phrase "constipated thinking." Mind mapping for me is a way to grease the skids, as it were, since the hardest part in organizing thoughts is just getting them down. While I prefer pen and paper--the tactile sense of it helps me--the mind map is a useful tool for taking what is essentially a disorganized mass of thoughts and figuring out how to organize it.