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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A mindful life, one decision at a time
Today marks my last blog for Artful Choice. It has been an exciting year of writing about decisions small and big and the forces that help shape them and make them what they are—and Big Think has provided a truly wonderful home, a welcoming and vibrant platform for which I couldn’t be more grateful ...
Amidst the growing momentum of the election season, I catch myself thinking, with a worried look on my face: at the end of the day, what does a voting decision actually come down to? The reason for my worry is simple. I’ve spent a little too much time with the research of Princeton’s Alexander ...
The crowd surges around you, lurching forward in one overpowering swell. There’s panting and shoving, sharp elbows and raised voices, clawing and tearing, frenzied looks and frazzled nerves. Light blaring in your eyes, tinny music blasting in your ears. And the nagging feeling that somewhere ...
Can we be aware without actually paying attention? In other words, can our brains somehow imbibe visual information from the outside world without any conscious effort on our part? It would certainly be nice if that were the case. As it happens, the necessity of visual attention for visual ...
These days, it seems like wherever you turn, there’s a story of a researcher who has gone over to the dark side. There was Marc Hauser at Harvard, who resigned after he’d been accused of eight counts of scientific misconduct. There was Frank Fischer, the Rutgers political scientist who committed ...
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about just how powerful our beliefs about ourselves can really be. For now, I’m not worried about aging—the subject of Monday’s article—but I am worried about those areas where I may, unbeknownst to myself, be holding back my own development, or at the very least ...
As we make sense of the world around us, our minds often take shortcuts, generalizing, cutting corners, making connections and engaging in inferences as they integrate all of the incoming information into a cohesive whole. And as we make sense of people, we typically engage in the exact same ...
In most circumstances, narcissism doesn’t go over well. We tend not to like individuals who exhibit arrogance or too much dominance or hostility—all traits associated with the narcissist. But there’s one big exception to the rule: leadership. For some reason, when we rate narcissists on leadership ...
This past Saturday, October 15th, marked a momentous occasion in the history of cleanliness: the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day. Yes, it exists. Established by the Global Public Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap in 2008, it has since been celebrated by schools, families, and ...
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted in October, but has been reposted here to illuminate the research approach of Daniel Kahneman, a recent guest on Big Think. On Monday evening, I went to see Daniel Kahneman give a talk on his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman ...
Last December, a series of provocative studies appeared in Science. The finding: imagine eating a food, over and over and over, and you will eat less of it when you are actually given the opportunity to do so. At first glance, it seems completely counterintuitive. Don’t we get hungry when we watch ...
Today, another Ig-Nobel Prize installment, this time from the actual winner in Psychology, Karl Halvor Teigen. The question: why do we sigh? Is a sigh, as that all-time greatest song in the all-time greatest film suggests, just a sigh? Or is it a signal of something more? In a series of studies ...
In 2011, the (in)famous IgNobel prizes were awarded to ten lucky winners. And I’d like to honor the winner in Literature (though the nature of the theory is such that it may as well have been Psychology, as is often the case), Dr. John Perry. The achievement: the theory of Structured ...
Two people are talking to each other. One nods his head to emphasize a point. The other follows suit, just a moment later. One crosses his foot over his knee. Soon, the other is doing the same. One shifts to the right. The other, across from him, shifts to the left, mirroring the movement. A few ...
Recently, while working on a piece about memory and smell, I came upon a concept that I’d never before heard about: blind smell. I’d read often enough about blindsight, the ability of individuals who are blind to detect visual stimuli even though they have no conscious experience of seeing, but ...