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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Crossing boundaries to use the perspectives and methodologies related to an interdiscipline or an interdisciplinary field
What motivated the perpetrators of the carnage at the Boston Marathon on Monday? Authorities are a step closer to identifying those responsible, and we may eventually learn why they decided to detonate bombs at the finish line of America’s premier road race. But the meaning of the attack goes well ...
Amid all the cheering about the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), another high-tech, path-breaking model in higher education is being developed in San Francisco with the help of a $25 million seed grant. Minerva University, set to admit its first class of undergraduates in 2015, bills ...
I tried something new this week on the first day of my spring term humanities seminar. Rather than hand out the syllabus and introduce the themes and texts coming up, I asked my students to think back over the past few months and identify Big Ideas To Hold On To from the fall semester: concepts ...
Valentines Day is fast approaching, Praxis readers, and you don’t want to be caught without a date. With Internet romance sites catering to virtually every interest — Christian Mingle for New Testament followers (“Find God’s match for you”), Red State Date for Republicans (“Find your Running Mate ...
With Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the 2012 election is shaping up to be a battle over whether and how the federal government should tackle the division of wealth in the United States, a gap that has been steadily rising since the 1970s. As the debate unfolds this fall ...
Financial management and youth are like oil and vinegar--they don’t mix. Managing finances is a distant and removed—and thus boring--prospect for most young people. In fact, the very idea of managing anything is unappealing to today’s youth. The teenage years are the rebel years, the years when ...
Twentieth-century liberalism lives on in forms of the social contract that are outmoded for the twenty-first century’s globalized, technological world. Liberalism today is entirely reactive, fending off attempts by conservatism to erode the social contract as it has been known to operate in the ...
I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any ...
In 1712, nobody would have looked at you funny if your business card read: "Surgeon, Apothecary, Investigator of the Unknown. Also, Shoemaker." There are many reasons why, in 2012, that's no longer the case. Among them, the increasing specialization driven by the rise of the great universities ...