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.
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What exactly is happening in our brains when we are making decisions
Imagine, for a moment, that you recently discovered you are an opera lover. A friend dragged you to “Aida” last year and you were enraptured. The same friend took you to “Don Giovanni” and you melted as the first ominous notes of the overture filled the hall. You’d like to harness your new-found ...
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
A pet peeve that I have in the context of happiness research is that it’s called happiness research. I think the word "happiness" doesn’t mean all that much because it confounds satisfaction with life with mood. But more importantly, I think the word conveys a frivolous idea of what the social ...
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...
Last week, I looked into evidence that Americans badly misperceive the magnitude of the wealth gap in their country: the actual distribution in the United States is much more inegalitarian than we think it is. Several readers and students have asked me why I think this is the case. How could we be ...
A few years ago, at mile 20 of my second marathon, I promised myself I would never again run a 26.2 mile race. I had trained impeccably, ran my first mile a little slower than goal pace, as everyone advises, and was primed to shave seven minutes off my previous time and traverse the five boroughs ...
Since the standards-based model of education overtook American public schools a generation ago, the answer to this question has been simple: prepare students for college and get them ready to be productive participants in the workforce. The new Common Core Standards Initiative — already adopted by ...
In October the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a scathing report identifying Lance Armstrong as the ruthlessly-driven mastermind of a 10-year doping scheme. Armstrong, a cancer survivor and an inspiration to millions, was shown to be deceitful, manipulative and remorseless -- many of the telltale ...
In our increasingly overloaded lives today we need shortcuts, or rules of thumb, to guide our decision-making. So says Big Think expert Robert Cialdini, professor of marketing and psychology at Arizona State University. Cialdini has co-authored the new book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be ...
Any defence of normalcy by definition enforces an opposition to, or even the concept of, the ‘abnormal’. But who or what is abnormal? Women – in various ‘non-feminine’ roles were and are regarded as abnormal – whether indulging in the delights of other women, equal rights, independence, a ...
Yesterday, nearly two thousand people “liked” this quote posted by Big Think on Facebook: Several subscribers appreciated the irony in Russell’s quip. Here are two: Below, I’ll return to the irony Thomas, Nancy and a few other Big Think Facebook perusers noticed — by the way ...
What's the Big Idea? As the K-12 school year starts up again in full force, it's worth asking: are American public schools really failing? According to the measure set by the country's most important piece of federal education legislation, the answer is yes. In 2011, nearly half of American ...
What's the Big Idea? Hey, did you know that sex improves your self-esteem? It's also linked to increased bladder control, reduced depression, fewer colds, pain-relief from the rush of oxytocin that precedes orgasm, better teeth (seminal plasma contains zinc; who knew?), and "a happier prostate ...
What's the Big Idea? Until the 1980s, the scientific consensus was that the nervous system was fixed and incapable of regeneration. Growth of neurons was considered most active during prenatal development. As we age, neurons atrophy, the thinking went. Now scientists believe new neurons are ...
What's the Big Idea? Philosopher Slavoj Žižek is fundamentally anti-capitalist, and yet, the man who describes himself as a “complicated Marxist” also expresses palpable irritation at the idea that capitalists are nothing more than egomaniacal psychopaths. In a recent interview with Big Think ...