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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Attaining psychological well-being, or the absence of mental disorder
What's the Latest Development? When groups of generally healthy medical patients aged 50 and over were instructed to play a video game that increased in difficulty and complexity with each new level, researchers at the University of Iowa found that they gained years of cognitive processing ...
A few years ago, at mile 20 of my second marathon, I promised myself I would never again run a 26.2 mile race. I had trained impeccably, ran my first mile a little slower than goal pace, as everyone advises, and was primed to shave seven minutes off my previous time and traverse the five boroughs ...
What's the Big Idea? Second only in vulnerability to the newborn baby is the new parent. This pathetic creature, no matter how many higher degrees it may possess, is a target for every silver-tongued huckster with a more cuddly (or less cuddly, but suffocation-risk-free) crib mattress or ...
Since the standards-based model of education overtook American public schools a generation ago, the answer to this question has been simple: prepare students for college and get them ready to be productive participants in the workforce. The new Common Core Standards Initiative — already adopted by ...
In October the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a scathing report identifying Lance Armstrong as the ruthlessly-driven mastermind of a 10-year doping scheme. Armstrong, a cancer survivor and an inspiration to millions, was shown to be deceitful, manipulative and remorseless -- many of the telltale ...
The late Vice Admiral James Stockdale's finest hour did not come as Ross Perot's Vice Presidential candidate, which is how most Americans got to know him. Admiral Stockdale was the highest ranking naval officer to be held prisoner during the Vietnam War, and he made it through hell. In ...
Are you convinced that your moral and political views are the right ones? If you were to lay out all of your views and examine them, would they fit together in a coherent package? Are you open to new ideas that run contrary to your intuitions? In my last post I explored Bertrand Russell’s ...
What's the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller's daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through critical strategic victories in the 100 Years' War, claiming to be guided by divine insight. In the very first hours of the ...
What’s the Big Idea? “Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets,” said Andy Warhol. It seems America agrees: adult entertainment is an estimated $10 billion dollar industry in the U.S., though the ethics of capturing and manufacturing sexual desire on ...
Do you believe in God? Sometimes this question warrants more than just a yes or no answer. To categorize one's own beliefs about the possibility of the existence of a deity, Dawkins proposed a "spectrum of probabilities" in his book The God Delusion. This spectrum consists of two extremes -- strong ...
What's the Big Idea? If the scientific consensus had been right, Sue Barry would still be seeing in 2-D. Barry was born with strabismus, a condition in which the eyes couldn't look in the same place at the same time. By the age of two, she’d undergone three surgeries, but the operations ...
What's the Big Idea? In a recent interview, the United States’ foremost educational historian Diane Ravitch told Big Think what really matters when it comes to learning, inside schools and out. Contrary to conventional wisdom, she says, it's not K-12 teachers who are most responsible for kids ...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Dr. Francine Shapiro, a senior research fellow at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, director of the EMDR Institute, and founder of the non-profit EMDR-Humanitarian Assistance Programs. Shapiro was a recipient of the International ...
“Do you think we should get our brains scanned before getting married?” a friend asked me as we browsed a crowded department store, selecting important items for her bridal registry. At first I thought I must have misheard her. She threw the question out much in the way she might have asked how ...
What's the Big Idea? There’s a revolution going on in neuroscience, says science writer Kayt Sukel, and it’s happening on two fronts. One way the science is changing: researchers are finally beginning to include both male and female subjects in their studies. Another is epigenetics, a new way of ...