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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Speech recognition technology continues to fascinate language and cognitive science researchers, and Apple’s introduction of the Siri voice assistant program in its recent iPhone 4S was heralded by many as a great leap toward realizing the dream of a computer you can talk to. Fast-forward half a ...
Welcome to a new feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week we're featuring a discussion prompt from Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and conductor of the American Symphony ...
Let’s say you’re in the top fifth percentile of avid readers, tearing through a book a week on average. With such literary gusto raising your sails, you might feel like the entire world is an open book to browse at your leisure. But in actuality, you will hardly scratch the surface of available ...
“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” —A Charlie Brown Christmas Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you. But the answer involves a little textual analysis. After all, where does Christmas come from, if not books? I don’t mean the rituals of the holiday, most of which are ...
Big Think seems to be involved in a lot of meme-creation these days. And two prominent examples, featuring past Big Think experts Neil deGrasse Tyson and Salman Rushdie, happen to involve the word “badass.” We are proud of these significant contributions to contemporary culture. The Neil ...
1. Leave your wallet behind. Swipe your mobile phone instead. Perhaps we'll remember 2011 fondly as the year the credit card died. In January, Big Thinker (and tech entrepreneur) James Currier reported that Biometrics had gone mainstream -- and that your leather wallet would soon be replaced by a ...
What's the Big Idea? Do holiday sales make your palms sweat, eliciting the kinds of emotional reactions (pressure, nervousness, glee) you'd usually reserve for loved ones? That's because they're designed to. As anyone who has run out for a box of trash bags and returned with a lifetime supply of ...