Effectively, I rely on the search bar and the purple link to remember the recipe for me. The definition of “epistemology” stubbornly refused to stick in my head, as did the year Ray Bradbury first published “ A Sound of Thunder,” so I found myself searching for this information once a week or so, clicking that friendly purple link every time.Īnother example: I’ve been making the same oatmeal cookie recipe for years, but I have yet to memorize it I just Google it whenever I have a craving. When I was doing my doctoral work in English and new media studies, I had a tendency to use Wikipedia to keep track of high-level definitions and straightforward details, like when a book was published or when a historical event happened. This got us thinking: Is this an effective use of brainpower? Does the space we free up by deploying a second brain get used productively for something else? Or is relying on a second brain a lazy habit that leaves us less knowledgeable, capable of making fewer connections? In fact, we found that 62% of Stack Overflow’s regular users visited the same question more than once in a three-month span.Ĭlearly, many of us are eager to outsource the work of information recall by treating external information repositories (especially those rich in user-generated content, such as Stack Overflow and Reddit) as second brains: personal knowledge management systems supported by technology.
With more than half of developers greeting purple links like old friends (and another 16% reacting with amusement), it was apparent that people were visiting the same questions repeatedly.
Either way, that purple link is reassuring-and, perhaps, exactly what you were looking for. Maybe you’re trying to remember how to exit Vim (again), or maybe you just need to grab a specific regex. Fifty-two percent of you described your reaction as “Hello, old friend”: meaning you’ve searched for and located this information before. Two years ago, we asked how you feel when you search for an answer and find a purple link-that is, a previously-clicked one. Like: Why do our brains work the way they do? Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey answers plenty of questions, but it always raises some new ones, too.
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