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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One of the greatest obstacles to finding your life’s task quite honestly can be your parents. We all love our parents – at least most of us do. And they mean the best. But often they’re the ones that screw us up most in the sense that they want to consciously or unconsciously direct you in a path ...
You might find, as most of us do, that when you're arguing with someone you start to feel frustrated with them or combative with them or irritated by them and that can make it especially hard to rationally consider what they're saying. So one trick that I've found particularly useful is to ...
A long tradition of thinking tells us that due to man's animal nature we need to have order imposed from above, in the form of religion. Without religion, we could not live together, and that is why all human societies believe in the supernatural and have developed one religion or another. This ...
What's the Latest Development? Computer scientists and artificial intelligence experts say that a project to create digital roundworms represents an essential stepping stone toward the fusion of life and non-life. The project, called OpenWorm, is an opensource effort to elucidate the principles ...
In Drunk Tank Pink I talk about the effect of symbols on various outcomes. And some of the symbols I talk about I call super symbols. And they’re super symbols because they have even greater meaning than maybe some other symbols do. And I think maybe the greatest super symbol in our culture and ...
You only know how hard it is to be a responsible consumer after you've tried it - running laps around isles trying to find that one brand you know is free-trade, reading labels to avoid carcinogenic ingredients, or looking for the organic produce sticker (5 digit code starting with 9 means organic ...
What's the Latest Development? While only three percent of the world's surface is covered by urban landscapes, more than half of the human population lives in city environments. That's changing human culture as well as human biology, say genetic experts. "The spread of genetic diversity can be ...
What's the Latest Development? Pediatricians are encouraging children to play more video games, as long as those games run on consuls that depend on body movement, such as Xbox-Kinect and Wii, to move the game forward. A new study published in The Journal of Pediatrics has found that such games ...
If you want to stop smoking here’s the best advice that I could give you. The first thing I would say is, smoking is actually not physically addictive for very long after you stop smoking. So we know from studies that about 100 hours after your last cigarette, all of the nicotine is out of your ...
“I believe the children are our future.” Never has a more brazen tautology graced the opening line of a Top 40 song. But when Whitney Houston popularized these words in her 1986 hit, she gave voice to an orientation that seems to be in retreat today. For Douglas Rushkoff, author of a new ...
What's the Latest Development? Biologists at Princeton and Johns Hopkins universities have created an artificial human ear—using a three-dimensional printer, no less—that detects sound better than natural human ears. "The technique lets scientists mimic the structural complexity of the ear ...
In terms of sustainability and what we eat and what its footprint is on the environment and the consequences of eating one thing versus another, obviously it makes a lot of sense to be eating insects. They’re incredibly plentiful. They’ve got a very short turnover rate. You could be eating ...
What's the Latest Development? University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo has found that social isolation hurts our ability to self-regulate, driving us to eat poorly and exercise less. "In one experiment, participants made to feel socially disconnected ate many more cookies than those ...
The issue of risk is absolutely central to being a creative person. Whether it’s being a write or an entrepreneur or an artist risk is something you have to think about a lot and deal with a lot. Trying to create a life that is fulfilling and meaningful and satisfying to you is much harder than ...
When you look at the United States at the moment and you think about our future one of the things that you might ask is what are we good at? We used to be good at creating jobs, but we’re not so good at creating jobs. We used to be good at building bridges or highways or infrastructure. We’re ...