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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Technology introduces new ways of doing things that disrupt or overturn traditional business methods and practices
This past week at Singularity University has been stimulating, to the say the least. Everyone here is on the same wavelength: we’re thinking exponentially, dreaming up ways we can improve the world, and we’ve all been experiencing SU’s cross-disciplinary, future-oriented education, which I can ...
By Rick Popely Someday, personal transportation may be in automated vehicles that drive themselves and run on electricity or an alternative fuel. But for the foreseeable future, most Americans will rely on oil and their personal driving skills to get from Point A to Point B. That was the ...
You may be familiar with Moore’s Law. The phenomenon was first described in a 1965 paper by Gordon Moore of Intel, and it spelled out the notion that computing capacity (via the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit) will double every two years. Since the idea’s inception, Moore’s ...
A new era requires a new vocabulary. Will we still talk about the “mobile” phone when all phones are mobile, or when they are implanted within us? Does “evolution” really capture our deepening entanglement with technology today, or should we instead speak of human-technology coevolution? More ...
The blogosphere won’t stop talking about the Facebook IPO story. The stock (FB), which has been publicly traded for less than 2 weeks, has fallen below $30/share and the bearish investors are already touting it to be the worst IPO in modern history. Around the web, all the social-media pundits seem ...
What is the Big Idea? Residents of Ciudad Juárez, home of the highest murder rate in Mexico, now have some relief from the violence through a virtual reality therapy program similar to the one used to treat Iraq war soliders who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. The virtual scenes ...
Private company Space X successfully launched its unmanned Falcon 9 rocket into space early Tuesday morning from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Worldcrunch provided some fun facts we should know about this historic event. 1. SpaceX is the first private company to ...
Increasingly innovative computer scripts are being created that automate entire criminal processes—processes that, in the past, used to require human intervention. Don’t like your boss? Threaten to tell his wife about the affair with his secretary unless he pays you to keep quiet. The problem ...
Jason Silva is an optimist. With a capital O. His optimism hits you full force the moment you meet him – the broad, beaming grin, the reassuring handshake . . . no, before that, in the form of multiple enthusiastic exclamation points in his every email. More specifically, he’s optimistic about the ...
Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century” according to Newsweek. Last week, Shlain was honored with a Disruptive Innovation Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC. She stopped by our studio to talk about the participatory ...
What's the Big Idea? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson believes in the power of science -- so much so that he gets hate mail for it. From children. As director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Tyson made the controversial decision to remove references to ...
What's the Big Idea? Around half of the world's population currently lives in urban settings, and it has been projected to increase to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. The challenge of taking care of all these future city inhabitants will be enormous. Will we see the proliferation of ...
It has been 130 years since the first practical light bulbs began to light up the world. In 1881, the Savoy Theatre in the City of Westminster, London was fitted with incandescent light bulbs, becoming the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Since then, there ...
What is the Big Idea? From Ben Franklin to Steve Jobs, America has always been a land of inventors and tinkerers, according to Adam Davidson, economic columnist for The New York Times Magazine. But it wasn't always easy. "In the past, someone with a new idea would have had to actually build ...
This month’s buzz award was won by Google’s secretive Project Glass, a concept in development by Google X Lab that promises to replace our smartphones with augmented reality glasses. It’s anticipated that this exciting futuristic eyewear will be available next year in stores. But Google Glasses are ...