What is connection mapping?

Connection mapping is a concept in personal epistemology: The connections between things carry as much meaning as the things themselves.

Example: You have notes on 'working memory,' 'cognitive load,' and 'externalization.' Separately, they're three isolated facts. But the moment you map the relationships — working memory limits cause cognitive load, externalization reduces cognitive load, reduced load frees working memory — you've built a causal loop that none of the individual notes contain. The insight lives in the edges, not the nodes.

This concept is part of Phase 13 (Relationship Mapping) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for relationship mapping.