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.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
A mindful life, one decision at a time
In Guantánamo Files, the New York Times coverage of Guantánamo from WikiLeaks documents, one piece in particular caught my attention: a discussion of the difficulty of judging detainees’ risk of future violence. Among other facts, the authors bring up two specific cases. Said Mohammed Alam Shah ...
Is the world really what it appears? Is what we see really what we get? Or, do our eyes have ways of playing tricks on us? Like the couple in this thumbnail. Are they old? Are they young? Are they a couple at all, or a backdrop for something else entirely? Take a look at these two lines, and ...
Yesterday, we passed the birthday of Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889). So let’s take a moment to reflect, something that becomes increasingly important as the memory of his infamous reign grows further and further into the past. But why should we care, in a blog about the art of making choices, about ...
With the recent publication of Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein, it’s hard to avoid someone, somewhere (the New York Times is a safe bet) writing on the ins and outs of memory. While I don't feel like I need to say anything more on that particular topic (my summary in three word: build ...
Today, I was planning to write about memory in decision making, but when I came across this new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science, I felt like I had to write a brief post-script to last week’s blog post on teamwork. A series of studies on the effects of group collaboration on ...
Teamwork. Support. Group (there's that word) synergy. These are all hallmarks of positive business-speak and, one would assume, business practice. They've become the modern calling cards of businessmen who want to appear non-hierarchical, hip, in touch with the new spirit of entrepreneurship. But ...
Choices, choices, everywhere… Our decisions matter. You don’t need me to tell you that. Of course they matter. It almost seems a tautology, a restatement of the obvious, of the very definition of “decision.” And yet, even though we make decisions at every point in our lives, from the most ...