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
We've all been forced at some point to listen to someone yammering obnoxiously on their cell phone in a public place. But now we can fight back. Japanese engineers have developed a speech-jamming gadget called the "SpeechJammer" gun, an "artificial speech disturbance system," that records people ...
If Julius Caesar hadn't accidentally burned down the Library of Alexandria, the story goes, we long ago would have colonized Mars. That notion, popularized by Carl Sagan, among others, is that the intellectual adventure that has led us into space began at that library, "the brain and glory of the ...
"If you can't say Fuck, you can't say, Fuck the government." -- Lenny Bruce In this video, Lenny Bruce excoriates the cultural impulse to censor "dirty words" over violent images, which he traces back to religious roots. What we've come to call a "dirty movie" -- the one with a ...
What's the Big Idea? What’s more offensive than crushed heads and mangled limbs? Exposed female nipples, according to Facebook’s criteria for deleting user content, published for the first time on Gawker two weeks ago. The documents were leaked by a former employee at oDesk, the California ...
What’s the big idea? During an interview with the New Yorker in 2007, Karl Rove argued that information technology is influencing Americans to become more fiscally conservative. He said: “There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture ...
What's the Big Idea? What Wikipedia is not, according to Wikipedia: a paper encylopedia, a dictionary, a publisher of original thought. A soapbox. A means of self promotion. A link dump, social network, blog, textbook, manual, guidebook, newspaper, or crystal ball. It is also not a bureacracy, a ...
"The most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor," Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler observe in their recent book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think . Demographers have found alarming birth rates in the developing world, and it is linked to what Diamandis and Kotler call the ...
It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis. But in a sense that’s not surprising. Because doing data science has always been hard. And even expert data scientists usually have to spend lots of time ...
It's not easy being an optimist in 2012. There's just too much to worry about: a global economic downturn, climate change, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, failing education systems, you name it. We are bombarded with bad news all the time, and we eagerly eat it up because our brains are ...
Move over, David Beckham, Matthew Broderick, Jerry Seinfeld and Donald Trump. The Super Bowl commercial that caught our attention was a Best Buy spot called "Phone Innovators" featuring none other than Big Think favorite Ray Kurzweil. "I'm Ray Kurzweil," the futurist and inventor says in the ...
As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane visual landscape. The newest innovation comes from a joint venture between DARPA (Defense Advanced ...
Our university system is bloated, inefficient, too expensive, and increasingly out-of-sync with a digital society and global economy. Dr. Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard, is on a mission to change the way we think about higher education. In his new ...
What's the Big Idea? Big Think co-founder Peter Hopkins is fond of thinking against the grain, and when it comes to the current debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Hopkins's thinking is true to form. According to Hopkins, while SOPA has been "vilified and grossly mischaracterized ...
What's the Big Idea? Wikipedia’s call to “imagine you live in a world without free knowledge” may have been dramatic, but it was also effective: after 24 hours of living without the history of everything at your fingertips, you probably got the point. Journalists compared the shutdown of ...
Yesterday thousands of websites including Google and Wikipedia voluntarily went dark, or restricted access to their websites in protest of the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation that could come before Congress as early as next week. Big Think asked Internet expert Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of ...