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 introduces new ways of doing things that disrupt or overturn traditional business methods and practices
Disruptive innovations often take a long time to come to fruition. So for those of you who were around in 1999, 2000 and 2001, the world was coming to an end. Everything was being disrupted and we weren’t going to buy our car, we were just going to buy the subscription to OnStar and everything ...
What's the Latest Development? According to a recent article in New Scientist, defense contractor Raytheon is working on developing a portable, reduced-range version of the crowd-dispersal military technology known as Active Denial. In its current form, it works by directing high-frequency ...
What's the Latest Development? Software developer Federico Zannier recently launched a Kickstarter campaign titled "A bite of Me" in which he offers up his digital footprint -- including but not limited to "[e]mails, chat logs, location data, browser history, [and] screenshots" -- for sale ...
What's the Latest Development? At a recent SIGCHI conference in Paris, researchers presented their paper describing the effect of password meters on users' choices of passwords. Test subjects who were asked to evaluate the usability of a university computer system were instructed to change their ...
What's the Latest Development? Now that the US State Department has temporarily banned the release of schematics for 3D printed guns -- after they were downloaded over 100,000 times since their publication last week by the firearms manufacturer Defense Distributed -- writer Cory Doctorow wonders ...
What's the Latest Development? At the most recent TVNext Hack event, where developers competed for prizes in several different television tech categories, the winning "Best of Show" entry went to Twivo, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that blocks Twitter messages containing user ...
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 ...
Eric Schmidt saw Disconnect and loved it. And he asked me to bring it to his employees at Google and to show it. So I just played it for the Google crowd and I noticed lot of people wearing Google Glass. And it got me thinking that would be the most exciting thing for a documentarian ...
What's the Latest Development? This week at the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers' RFID conference in Orlando, scientists from North Dakota State University are scheduled to present a new form of "smart" paper created with a process they call Laser Enabled Advanced Packaging ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at the University of Illinois have built a digital camera that uses the configuration of insects' compound eyes as its inspiration. The camera consists of 180 artificial imaging units -- called ommatidia in the insect world -- each of which sends light ...
What the development of new media has done is to make it much more difficult than it used to be for organizations and individuals to operate in a quite backwater unnoticed by anybody else, just getting on with their own lives or perhaps just running their own business not very well. The ...
What's the Latest Development? Available next month as a free app for Android devices, KALQ is a keyboard layout that groups keys into two 4-by-4 grids that reside in the bottom quadrants of the screen. This relocation allows a user to type using their thumbs when holding a tablet horizontally ...
If you missed the White House Science Fair today -- which you probably did -- you can see the rebroadcast below, featuring hosts LeVar Burton and Bill Nye. Here's why this is worth watching. In case you were worried about the state of science education in the U.S., this video will give you a ...
We’re going to see what we almost always see with new gadgets, which is the makers of them compete on how many new features they can put into the device. So we’ll see multi-functional e-readers, e-readers that will allow you to have social networking going on when you read, that allow much more ...
In 1991, there was the so-called "Carville primary," notes Al Hunt in Bloomberg. Before any votes were cast or counted, all of the Democratic candidates "vied for the services of the hottest political consultant, James Carville." As Hunt predicts, "the equivalent this time might be the Teddy Goff ...