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.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Technology is disrupting education from the outside
There are two layers to self-paced learning, from a Khan Academy point of view. One is the videos that students can watch at their own pace, and there’s also the exercise portion which the students get to complete at their own pace. I have learned that there is an academic term for this ...
What's the Latest Development? A Consumer Reports study revealed that last year, 78 percent of parents helped create their kids' Facebook pages, and 7.5 million users were younger than 13, the minimum age requirement for having an account. Amy Jo Martin, CEO of social media strategy and ...
“I believe the children are our future.” Never has a more brazen tautology graced the opening line of a Top 40 song. But when Whitney Houston popularized these words in her 1986 hit, she gave voice to an orientation that seems to be in retreat today. For Douglas Rushkoff, author of a new ...
What's the Latest Development? For their latest annual field trip to Indonesia's Wakatobi Marine National Park, University of Essex professor David Smith decided to try something new: He and his class dove 18 meters (59 feet) under the surface of the ocean, and then he conducted his lecture on ...
“Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.” -William Deresiewicz Imagine you are a painter for a moment. In front of you is a blank canvas, sitting desolate on its stand, awaiting your ...
Science fiction writer William Gibson famously stated on NPR’s Fresh Air back in 1993, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” It’s a quote that in many ways still holds true today, illustrating the divide between developed and developing countries, and even more ...
In her recent TED Book, Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Ainissa Ramirez makes an impassioned call for a recommitment to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in our schools and throughout our society. The post below is an excerpt from ...
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." So wrote George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 Maxims for Revolutionists . Shaw, who humorously dismissed secondary education as "sequestration and imprisonment of children so as to prevent them being a continual nuisance to their parents," had great contempt ...
Five years ago today, Big Think first launched to the public. What a five years it's been! We've had some of the world's most influential, significant, radical thinkers through our doors. And these doors have changed several times over. My business partner Victoria Brown and I began this project ...
Big Think would like to congratulate Peter Salovey, who was named the 23rd President of Yale University last week. Since Salovey succeeds Richard C. Levin, whose tenure at Yale lasted two decades, this represents a generational shift. Indeed, one of Salovey's principal challenges, he told The New ...
What's the Big Idea? In a blog post from December 2010, Dr. Michio Kaku discussed the perils of our public school system and called into question the schools' curiosity-crippling methods, which he believes cause intellectual stagnation among our nation's children. Dr. Kaku’s sentiments seem ...
Big Think's own founder and president Peter Hopkins gave Rahim Kanani at Forbes some face time in preparation for the 2012 Social Innovation Summit taking place next week at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. The two gabbed about everything from Big Think's achievements to ...
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 ...
What's the Big Idea? Visit Gizmodo, Wired, TechCrunch, or Engadget, or talk to "epiphany addict" Jason Silva, and a bracing wave of techno-optimism will wash over you. The future, you'll feel, will be a place of seamless, harmonious interconnectedness in which humans, separated for millennia by ...
What's the Big Idea? The history of scientific discovery, in Bill Nye's words: "Copernicus goes, the sun is the center, not the earth. Everybody’s like what, dude? Yeah. The earth goes around the sun. Oh, now everything adds up. Galileo says hey, you know, we’re not the only planet with a moon ...