We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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The development of useful products from living organisms
What's the Latest Development? Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a synthetic material that, when used to coat a device such as a heart valve or breast implant, prevents the body from rejecting it. The hydrogel is comprised of water and a special polymer that deflects all ...
What's the Latest Development? Two weeks after launching a Kickstarter campaign, Antony Evans and a small group of biotech hobbyists and entrepreneurs have raised over $250,000 to fund their efforts to create plants that glow in the dark. They plan to do this by employing synthetic biology ...
There’s no doubt that there’s going to be an international market for biotechnologies. And you’re going to have consumers going from one place to another trying to find enhancement technologies. But the good news for that, I think, is that they’re not very good. So what’s going to actually end ...
Ray Kurzweil is the author of the recent book How to Create a Mind. The first question we have for him is "why create a mind?" There are three purposes of reverse-engineering the brain. One is to do a better job of fixing it and because that's a business opportunity. Being able to master the ...
“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our ...
What's the Big Idea? The future is a difficult thing to grasp, and not just because we can't see it. Bringing innovation to life requires imagination, resourcefulness, the sort of limitless creative ambition we today associate mainly with science fiction writers. It wasn't always this way. As ...
In a recent Big Think interview with venture capital expert Bruce Gibney, we saw what technologies stand to go through revolutionary growth. 1) A rash of new companies have sprung up to meet the demand for transportation of crew and cargo to orbit and to the International Space Station left ...
Jason Silva is an optimist. With a capital O. His optimism hits you full force the moment you meet him – the broad, beaming grin, the reassuring handshake . . . no, before that, in the form of multiple enthusiastic exclamation points in his every email. More specifically, he’s optimistic about the ...
We have all experienced “dehumanizing” technology – software or hardware that seems to diminish our ability to communicate with others or to function effectively in the world. Technology that creates new boundaries between people rather than erasing old ones. With this in mind, Big Think is ...
The buzz surrounding physicist Stephen Hawking's newest experiments with communication technology has been a bit overexuberant, along the lines of "new technology could help Stephen Hawking communicate via brain waves!" Let's back up a little. The iBrain Hawking has been wearing is a small ...
How about this for an argument to raise the retirement age: If you don't keep working, your community could die off. That's the threat posed by an intersection of biology and economics which could finally make some famous two-hundred-year-old predictions come true. As the world's population grows ...
What's the Big Idea? In 2001, the human genome was published online for all to see: at once a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, a testament to international collaboration, and a fundamental shift in the way biological research would be conducted for the foreseeable future. The price tag? A ...
As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane visual landscape. The newest innovation comes from a joint venture between DARPA (Defense Advanced ...