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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What exactly is happening in our brains when we are making decisions
What's the Big Idea? A Florida teenager will have a bad headache for a while after being shot through the head with a three-foot fishing spear, but doctors expect a full recovery. Remarkably, doctors say that after two to three months of rehabilitation the patient will retain the full speech ...
Think of a situation where you had bulletproof facts, reason, and logic on your side, and believed there was absolutely no way the other person could say no to your perfectly constructed argument and proposal. To do so would be impossible, you figured, because there was no other logical solution or ...
Our interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman aired live on our site on Monday, April 30th, 2012. In this recap, he discusses his latest book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and answers a few viewer questions. Eagleman has referred to the brain as the body's "mission control center ...
Archimedes in the bathtub, Newton and the apple, Einstein's theory of special relativity -- Eureka! moments are what happens when hours of work come together in a single creative flash. In his new blog for Big Think, Sam McNerney will be dissecting these moments of genius, asking what is the nature ...
Editor's Note: Joanne Barkan is a writer for Dissent who sees serious flaws in the "school reform" movement that went national with the 2001 enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind law. In the following excerpts from her article, "Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reforms ...
What's the Big Idea? In a recent interview, the United States’ foremost educational historian Diane Ravitch told Big Think what really matters when it comes to learning, inside schools and out. Contrary to conventional wisdom, she says, it's not K-12 teachers who are most responsible for kids ...
Back in high school, my imagination was overtaken for a year or two by the poems and engravings of William Blake (1757-1827). In particular, and only semi-consciously, I absorbed some of Blake’s wild mythology about the relationship between Urizen, a deity representing Reason and Law, and Los – the ...
What's the Big Idea? In a 2011 interview, physicist Stephen Hawking declared, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail." Of course, the brain is not a computer in the literal sense of the word, but the brain-as-computer metaphor is a powerful one. Long ...
Pay attention, get focused, be vigilant, stay on task, keep your eye on the ball, listen up, get your head in the game: these are just a few of the many ways we have of calling on that very basic human skill of paying attention. There may be good reason for the variety of ways in which we ask ...
What's the Big Idea? Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview ...
What's the Big Idea? Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it ...
. . . is that it's a completely unreliable guide to decision making. Yet we tend to trust it implicitly, in ourselves and in others. This insight belongs to psychologist Daniel Kahneman - Nobel Prize winning cartographer of the human mind, and the author of Thinking, Fast, and Slow. Kahneman's ...
What's the Big Idea? On June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD: “The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t,” he noted. Five years later, he was traded to the Yankees. Fourteen years later ...
What’s the Big Idea? The space shuttle Challenger crashed on January 28th, 1986, seventy-three seconds after taking off from Cape Canaveral. The ship disintegrated in midair, sending six astronauts and the schoolteacher Christie McAullife plunging into the Atlantic Ocean. The tragedy ...
What's the Big Idea? The field of neuroscience evolved so rapidly in the past twenty years that it will pose unprecedented challenges to the legal system in the decades to come, changing the way we understand crime and punishment, says neuro-pioneer Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional ...