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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What's the Latest Development? In terms of urban landscaping, New York City's Central Park is a major achievement. Built in 1859 to contest Europe's monopoly on sophisticated city-living, the ample greenery of Central Park contributes to the quality of life New Yorkers have come to enjoy. In ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of scientists from Oxford University have shown that zapping the brain with electrical impulses improves its ability to complete mathematical problems. In an experiment, transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS), in which electrodes placed on the surface ...
The job of the human being, as you go through life, is to become less stupid. And that is the job of science, to try to educate us about the nature of what we are, our very nature, how we’re built, how we work, understand that and in doing that it seems to me is fulfilling and of great value and ...
Some people enjoy being angry and some people really hate it and that is a known difference. It is a know dimension of individual differences. For some people anger is a positive emotion. For others it’s negative. I happen to be an extreme case with for me anger goes into depression very quickly ...
This image shows the orbit of asteroid 1998 QE2 which will be making a flyby on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC). If the 1.7 mile space rock were to make impact, we would almost certainly be doomed. The good news is that the asteroid, which was discovered 15 years ago ...
One of the things that we have found in the study of networks is that whenever people are free to choose anything they want they usually choose what their friends have chosen and people tend to copy each other. This sort of fundamental mimicry or this mimicry that we humans evince is extremely ...
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 ...