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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A mindful life, one decision at a time
Whenever making claims about the brain and political attitudes, tread with care. It’s easy to open yourself up to intense criticism from the scientific community, on anything from methodology to claims of causality. But if you’re Colin Firth, do you really care? Or is it just cool that you’re not ...
The perennial question: how does media affect action? Or, to put it in more specific terms, does watching violent things on TV, reading about risk-taking on the internet, or playing a violent video game make us more violent and risky ourselves? Should we be worried? Aggression and observational ...
Have you been to this subway station? Look again. It’s not actually real. It’s part of a miniature model, on display at the Museum of Art and Design’s Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities exhibit (open through September 18). The exhibit focuses on ...
I can't count the number of times I heard, "It's not if you win or lose. It's how you play the game" when I was growing up. And how often I still hear it. Well, in some contexts, that sentiment might be true, but in others, our brains might beg to differ. Especially, that is, if we lose. Not ...
How wise is the crowd, really? A great deal of evidence, nicely summarized in James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, suggests, very wise. Crowds seem to be better at providing estimates and coming closer to a more accurate answer, at improving the diversity of opinion, at coordinating action ...
Choice is good. It’s always nice to have options. It makes us feel more in control; it supports our vision of ourselves as “deciders” in our own lives. But choice can also come with negative consequences. Too much choice? We might freeze up, or not make as good a decision as we would given fewer ...
Can our immune system lead us astray? Every day, our bodies fight off disease. But it’s costly to launch a full-out immune response, and over time, we’ve also evolved mechanisms for avoiding dangerous substances to begin with. The behavioral immune system (a term coined by Mark Schaller) is one ...
Happiness is typically conceptualized as having three factors: more positive feelings, fewer negative feelings, and increased overall satisfaction with life. Each one of these aspects seems like a pretty good deal. The benefits of happiness We all (or most of us, at any rate) want to be happy ...
Is free will real, or is just one of our happy illusions? As it turns out, the answer might not matter as much as our belief in the answer does. A recent study showed that, when people’s belief in free will was experimentally reduced, pre-conscious motor preparation, or that activity that precedes ...
Power changes how we make decisions. That’s what I thought when I first read about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s debacle – and the escapades that have apparently preceded it. Actually, the first thing I thought was, seriously? Did he seriously think he could keep getting away with more and more ...
What is IQ? The Intelligence Quotient, yes, but what does that mean, exactly? What does that little score, that has been tied in so much research to so many rosy outcomes, from better academic performance, to increased longevity and better health, to better performance on the job, signify ...
Question: How do you remain mindful when juggling two, three, four, however many things at once? Answer: You probably don’t. For a long time, cognitive scientists have observed that processing multiple streams of information at once seems problematic for the human brain. And yet, today ...
What is it about power that changes people – or if not changes, brings out those aspects of them that had heretofore lain dormant? As the old adage goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. While this may be true, is it just corruption that happens, or something else, something ...
Donald Trump was born in 1946. 34 years later, in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the American Psychiatric Association’s hefty volume of mental disorder classifications, the term “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD) first appeared as a ...
When we think testosterone, we think macho. We think male, manly. We probably also think aggressive. And we think that with good reason. Men do traditionally have higher testosterone levels than do women, and higher testosterone has indeed been associated repeatedly with increased risk-taking ...