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.
The growing influence of neuroscience on society, from neurofinance to neuroeconomics to neuroesthetics to neuroethics and neurolaw
What's the Latest Development? If the toys at the mall aren't doing it for your kid, consider this approach: Chile-based startup Thinker Thing is in the process of refining their Monster Dreamer, which is a headset that uses the wearer's brain waves as a blueprint for creating a unique Makerbot ...
What's the Latest Development? At a panel discussion at last week's World Science Festival, scientists and legal experts met to discuss the implication of putting "brains on trial." According to Stanford neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans are now ...
Imagine, for a moment, that you recently discovered you are an opera lover. A friend dragged you to “Aida” last year and you were enraptured. The same friend took you to “Don Giovanni” and you melted as the first ominous notes of the overture filled the hall. You’d like to harness your new-found ...
I think that this is a very exciting time to be studying human nature. Often people say it’s exciting because of the tremendous breakthroughs we’re making in understanding the brain and the new technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. But I disagree with that, that it’s the new ...
The world of neuroscience is abuzz with the news that a new technique has been developed to study brain anatomy in mice. By removing the brain and treating it with chemicals, researchers are able to obtain a transparent view. This advance was made by the bioengineering lab of Dr. Karl ...
So we have no idea what happens after we die, and I’ve taken that lack of our knowledge as an opportunity to write fiction about it. I have a book called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives , and the idea is to shine a flashlight around the 'possibly' space to illustrate how interesting is the ...
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...
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 ...
What's the Big Idea? This is a tale of two brains. One is Einstein's brain. The other is the Paleolithic brain. In the past few weeks we have learned significant insights about both, and how each one was uniquely qualified for the mental challenges of its time. Let's start with Einstein ...
In the most recent episode of Dexter , Showtime's series about a sympathetic serial killer, Michael C. Hall's eponymous character attempts to explain what makes him tick to his sister Debra, who has found him out. He turns to neuroscience: Dexter: An alarm is going off inside my lizard brain. ...
What's the Big Idea? The Internet has a terrible habit of misquoting Einstein on energy and creativity until he sounds like he’s the author of The Secret, not the theory of relativity. Here’s something he actually did say. Describing the effect of music on his inner life, he told a friend: “When ...
What's the Big Idea? Isaac Newton defined the optical spectrum, but it was Goethe who first understood that color is more than just a physical problem. In Theory of Colours (1840), the German writer and painter examined phenomena like colored shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration, as ...
When I heard the news of Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications on Monday — indiscretions that led to an apology and his resignation from the New Yorker on Tuesday — my jaw fell. Like Michael C. Moynihan, who exposed Lehrer in an article in Tablet, I was “completely fucking mystified” why the Rhodes scholar ...
What's the Big Idea? On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gun shot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn't out of the ordinary, since the Curtises lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the ...