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.
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The growing influence of neuroscience on society, from neurofinance to neuroeconomics to neuroesthetics to neuroethics and neurolaw
What's the Big Idea? Forget coffee and crosswords. If you want to supercharge your brain, you have to change your lifestyle. But only a few things about it. Here, we lay to rest some of the well-worn myths of power thinking, and give you the facts on what you can do to actually improve mental ...
What's the Big Idea? A funny thing happened with the invention of fMRI imaging. Rather than explaining away the mysteries of human experience, the technology that made it possible to visualize and map brain activity for the first time only further complicated our understanding of how the mind ...
What's the Big Idea? A Florida teenager will have a bad headache for a while after being shot through the head with a three-foot fishing spear, but doctors expect a full recovery. Remarkably, doctors say that after two to three months of rehabilitation the patient will retain the full speech ...
Irony lurks in the surge of interest in cognitive psychologists’ research on human reasoning: we seem to be desperately interested in reading about how poorly we think. If Descartes could behold the popularity of books by Daniel Kahneman and Leonard Mlodinow and the hundreds of articles and blog ...
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 ...
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A pioneer of neurotheology, Dr. Andrew Newberg uses fMRI and other neuroscientific tools to study religious experiences in the brain. He has the rare distinction of having studied Franciscan nuns and Tibetan monks in his lab. In this interview, originally broadcast live on Big Think on May 3, 2012 ...
What's the Big Idea? Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic ...
What's the Big Idea? David Eagleman's Laboratory for Perception is located on the ground floor of Baylor College of Medicine, but the vibe is more creative think tank than clinical academic enclave. The walls are enamelled in dry-erase paint and marked up with impromptu sketches, arrows, and ...
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 ...
The most creative solutions to difficult problems often seem to come out of nowhere. The mysterious nature of the “sudden flash of insight” has given rise to the myth of inspiration – the idea that brilliant ideas are visited upon us by some mysterious force or deity. That if your muse is being ...
Our interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman aired live on our site on Monday, April 30th, 2012. In this recap, he discusses his latest book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and answers a few viewer questions. Eagleman has referred to the brain as the body's "mission control center ...
What's the Big Idea? “Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years ago," writes philosopher Alva Noë in his book Out of Our Heads . It's a bold assertion in ...
Archimedes in the bathtub, Newton and the apple, Einstein's theory of special relativity -- Eureka! moments are what happens when hours of work come together in a single creative flash. In his new blog for Big Think, Sam McNerney will be dissecting these moments of genius, asking what is the nature ...
The basics of social behavior come from the brain’s emotional system, which is an important contributor to empathy and morality from infancy through adulthood. Babies often cry when they hear another baby crying, because knowing that another person is unhappy makes them feel bad. Even rats will ...
What's the Big Idea? A group of scientists have laid out an ambitious plan to tackle one of the grand challenges facing mankind in the early 21st century--develop a supercomputer that can simulate the brain. "This is one of the three grand challenges for humanity," notes Professor Henry ...