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
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 ...
If you hold the cynical view that Wall Street is just a bunch of people endlessly trading parts of companies back and forth, well, you don't really know what's going on. Not so much humans, but computers, are endlessly trading parts of companies, and even generating hundreds of thousands of fake ...
Alec Baldwin is no fan of The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who the actor lambasted in a recent Huffington Post outburst: "No one I know of in the theatre reads Brantley," Baldwin wrote, "except in the way that a doctor reads an x-ray to determine if you have cancer." In the ...
With per capita income above $5,000, China is no longer a poor country. That also means that China's growth rate will continue to slow. So that also means that fears that China's economy will overtake the U.S. are unfounded, argues Ruchir Sharma, author of Breakout Nations , who argues in the ...
A recent poll found that 29 percent of Americans think an armed rebellion might be necessary. And Americans are armed to the teeth. There are somewhere between 270 million to 300 million guns in the U.S., based on different estimates. That makes the U.S. the world leader in the category of guns ...
It is "human destiny" to go to Mars, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said today at the Humans 2 Mars Summit that is taking place this week at George Washington University in Washington, DC. You can watch the Summit streaming LIVE below. According to its website, H2M will be "a ...
In the video below it takes a laser custom-made from a flashlight and the laser diode of a Blu-ray burner drive about 7 seconds to cut down 100 black baloons like dominos. Watch here:
The video below demonstrates the handiwork of DARPA-funded dexterous robotic hand hardware. The adaptable, adaptable, low-cost robots that can use a wide range of human tools to assist in dangerous defense missions. The hand in this video was developed by iRobot of Bedford, Mass., with support ...
This 80-milligram robot is not only the size of an insect, it also maneuvers like flies with the help of piezoelectric muscles and rotating joints. Watch here: Watch more videos like this from Science Magazine.
You have been predicted — by companies, governments, law enforcement, hospitals, and universities. Their computers say, "I knew you were going to do that!" These institutions are seizing upon the power to predict whether you're going to click, buy, lie, or die. So writes Eric Siegel in his book ...
"This is not a "touchy-feely book," says Robert Kaplan, referring to his latest work, What You're Really Meant to Do: A Roadmap for Reaching Your Unique Potential. Think of it instead as a workout. "I'm trying to get you in shape and dust off some of the muscles you haven't used for reaching your ...
Nanophysicists have the most fun, or at least some IBM researchers do. The nanocinematographers (that's right, we just made up that word) used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of molecules and make a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. ...