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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Organizing information according to new hierarchies
The people of Oklahoma City suffered their second violent bout of tornados in as many weeks on Friday evening. These storms weren’t nearly as devastating as the EF5 twisters that took dozens of lives on May 20, but a mother and her baby died when their car rolled over on the highway, and three ...
The narrative I live by is the humanist narrative. If we are looking for morality, if we’re looking for vices and virtues, we can find them both in humanity—in human creations, human culture, humanity’s endeavor to develop our reason and our emotions and developing not only relationships between ...
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 ...
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
I’m tempted to say smart, creative people have no particularly different set of character traits than the rest of us, except for being smart and creative. Then, on the other hand, I have written about great physicists. I wrote a biography of Richard Feynman and a biography of Isaac Newton ...
"When I told my uncle who is a doctor that I’m speaking at TEDMED," says the artist Raghava KK, his uncle was dumbfounded. "Has the profession suffered some cardiovascular attack?" he asked. Not at all, Raghava replied. "Art and science are not that different." After all, they both tend to ...
Last week, I looked into evidence that Americans badly misperceive the magnitude of the wealth gap in their country: the actual distribution in the United States is much more inegalitarian than we think it is. Several readers and students have asked me why I think this is the case. How could we be ...
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 ...
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 ...
What's the Big Idea? In his new book, How To Create a Mind , Ray Kurzweil looks at the “pattern recognition” theory of the human mind, arguing that all higher-order thinking is based on a consistent pattern-recognition algorithm. "The neocortex is a metaphor machine," Kurzweil tells Big Think ...
Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, RealClearScience Newton Blog. The original is here. "Is scientific genius extinct?" That's the intriguing question posed by psychologist Dean Keith Simonton in Wednesday's publication of Nature. It's a sweeping inquiry to be sure -- one ...
What's the Big Idea? The markers of success in adult life include getting married, having children, making money and finding professional satisfaction. These achievements also have their corresponding failures, such as divorce and financial ruin. We tend to have misconceptions about all of ...
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes doesn't suffer fools gladly, but at least he is polite about it. If his behavior appears antisocial, we have to forgive him for it. After all, Sherlock is simply trying to optimize his brain, and the people around him aren't always helpful to that end. What's ...
What's the Big Idea? We're often at a disadvantage when it comes to problem-solving because we think too fast, and our analytic brains shut off new ideas before they have even emerged. Improvisation, on the other hand, creates "a set of experiences that allow you to fine-tune and hone all of the ...
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 ...