What sort of thinking are you good at? If you can't think spatially well, can you think mathematically, or linguistically? Off the top of my head I can't give any specifics, but it seems like it should be possible to construct an alternative scheme for learning how things connect.

For example, you could do it musically. Starting with The Beatles as galadon, you know it leads to the Rolling Stones (mainstream music, eastern road) and to The Backstreet boys (boy band, north road). Then from there the Rolling Stones leads to lead Zeppellin (hamsah mutazz) and the Backstret boys leads to N'Sync (Udgaard). Now I'm a musical ignoramous, so probably none of this makes any sense, but if you have a good knowledge of music, literature or art, or anything like that, maybe you can adapt that kind of knowledge to this purpose? Basically you'd be inverting the kind of learning aid people use that involves visually displaying related artists on a map.

What about free association? Could you group them by related words? That is, mother leads to baby (eastern road), father (silverwood), etc?

The problem with any of these ideas is getting them detailed enough to let you navigate within an area, and not just the overall map. But maybe you can start with sub-zones within an area, like say high road in galadon is a certain kind of idea (like "a piano") and the trade road is a different one (like "a violin"), so then you can see that they're sort of related (have strings) but go in different directions (percussed vs bowed).