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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The human body as a corporate or government entity
Today Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times has posted a thoughtful blog about universal health coverage, inspired in part by the tragic events in Aurora, Colorado. I've been involved in the debate about universal health coverage since the days of the Clinton national health plan in 1994, most ...
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Katie Hinde is the Director of the Comparative Lactation Laboratory at Harvard University. Her research examines mother's milk and how it contributes to infant development in humans and primates--including behavior, cognition and the brain. Here, she discusses the effects of breast milk on ...
What's the Big Idea? Long-time political activist and self-proclaimed "party crasher" Richard Tafel believes that American democracy is under threat. The environmental, economic, healthcare, and political systems we've relied on for decades are breaking down, he says. But unlike most ...
Gloria Feldt, author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change the Way We Think About Power, is comfortable with controversy. As president and CEO of Planned Parenthood from 1996-2005, she went up against an Arizona ballot initiative that would have outlawed all abortion in the state. Gloria ...
A new breed of legislation is sweeping the nation. 20 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, have legislation in place that employ ultrasounds as part of the abortion process. In ten of these states, the ultrasound is required, and in one of them, women must view the image and endure a ...