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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Videos from Big Think experts
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 ...
Drones aren't just the instruments of a tyrannical government that wants to kill its own citizens. Drones have an artistic side too. Witness the video below, which is a collaboration between the dance company Pilobulus and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Watch ...
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, an ancient Chinese text on military strategy, has been popularized in recent years as a playbook for Wall Street traders and NFL coaches. The teacher John Hunter, on the other hand, uses Sun Tzu's treatise to help students understand the connectedness of the global ...
David Foster Wallace's classic 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College was not well known until after his death. In the video below, this great piece of life advice is given visual accompaniment courtesy of The Glossary. Watch here: Watch the original speech here.
CERN and TED-Ed have collaborated on a great animation that explains the basics of the Higgs boson. Dave Barney and Steven Goldfarb's lesson was animation by Jeanette Nørgaard for TED-Ed. Watch here: View full lesson here: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-basics-...
When you think of a prosthetic limb, the first thing that comes to mind is not beauty. After all, these are products that are made by engineers, not designers. Meet Scott Summit, who uses 3D printing and digital scanning to make beautiful products that change the lives of people with prosthetic ...
In the world of Henry-Alex Rubin's new feature film, Disconnect , the hunters have a distinct advantage over the hunted and their protectors. The bullies and thugs have technology on their side, and they use it in all sorts of ways to stalk, trick, surprise and catch their prey. But don't ...
How can physicists tackle the problem of achieving faster-than-light travel? Marc Millis, the former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, explores this question in the video below from Space.com, and also provides an elegant answer to the question of why. Not only would ...
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The story of these economies is well known, and acknowledged. That is to say, these countries have a voice in setting the global economic agenda. But what about countries like Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, and others? They are growing rapidly ...
Real birds are capable of impressive acrobatic flying maneuvers because they can precisely control their wing motions. It is very difficult to replicate that with a robot because bird-like maneuvers require an extremely lightweight platform. The robot raven in this video, however, is built out ...
The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield just ended his command of the International Space Station, but not before the media-savvy commander issued a fitting sign-off: the first music video from space. Hadfield, who previously got our attention, and that of many others, with this microgravity ...
You should be willing to do something that will take 5 minutes or less for anybody. This simple notion is not only important for the purpose of being altruistic. It turns out that givers get good karma. One of the masters of the five-minute favor is Adam Rifkin, who was listed by Fortune as the ...
Mozart, Einstein and Steve Jobs were all masters of their respective fields. And this was due to their ability to elevate their minds to an extremely high level. People like this "have a feel for what’s coming next in the world," says Robert Greene, author of Mastery . "They can sense trends. They ...
High school student Jeff Bliss offers to give his teacher a lesson in the video below. Bliss implores his teacher to create an exciting learning environment for his classmates. The teacher then tells Bliss he is wasting her time and he needs to leave the classroom. Watch the video below and let ...
In her new book Gulp , the acclaimed science writer Mary Roach goes where few have gone before and few have ever desired to go: the human digestive system. Indeed, Roach marvels at the fact that this is her almost exclusive domain. And that's a good thing, because Roach is a gifted writer who is ...