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.
Videos from Big Think experts
Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, it is useful to look back at the various iterations of the Internet to see how it has evolved and where we might reasonably expect to see it go in the coming years and decades. The defining aspect of Web 1.0 was search. In other words, think Yahoo! in ...
In 2002, Richard Florida published his celebrated book The Rise of the Creative Class about the growth of the creative workforce and its implications for the rest of the culture and the economy. When the book was re-issued with updates ten years later, some of Florida's critics wondered whether the ...
When we think of the problem of over-parenting, we often mistakenly link it to wealthy people. The problem is much more pervasive than that, says the psychologist Madeline Levine, author of Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success . Levine says that kids from all backgrounds and at ...
Why did you start a business? To pursue your passion? To make money? That's all fine, but your passion will go unrealized and you'll never get rich if you're unable to serve your customer better than your competitor. As CEO at Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley had this realization, and he acted on ...
While Michael Bloomberg's plan to limit the sale of large sodas was shot down by a judge, Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman tackles the economic ideas behind this plan. Would it have worked? Watch the video here: Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made the decision last month that all telecommuting employees need to be working in Yahoo offices or quit. In a previous post, we speculated about Mayer's data-driven approach to making decisions, and how such a decision may have been a courageous move for Mayer, although ...
Early in the morning on February 15 a 55-foot meteor entered Earth's atmosphere undetected. The resulting explosion -- estimated to have the strength of 25 Hiroshimas -- woke a lot of people up. That is to say, the meteor created a shock wave that injured 1,200 people in the Chelyabinsk region ...
It wasn't a pleasant time to be at General Motors in January, 2009 when the company filed for the fourth-largest Chapter 11 in history and was rescued by taxpayers through direct loans, bailout cash and bankruptcy aid. "The workforce at GM was pretty disheartened as you can imagine," says Ed ...
What's the Big Idea? How do we go about buying and selling things on the Internet? The answer to this question is fundamental to the success of just about any business today. The answer also involves a simple, yet profound distinction from the way the customer decision process has been described ...
How do we optimize our brains in the Age of Connectivity? Do we need to use up valuable space remembering information that we can easily access on a handheld device? Have we already learned to optimize our brains without knowing it? We have indeed, according to a study published in the Journal of ...
Here's an all-too-common business scenario: A seemingly bright and charismatic CEO has a good run at a company. The numbers look good. In fact, most of the external indicators of success look good. That is why the news that the board has decided to dump this particular CEO is met with surprise ...
Do the times make the person or the person the times? Gautam Mukunda, author of the new book Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter , argues that most political science research "either implicitly assumes or explicitly argues that individual leaders don't much matter at all." Mukunda says that ...
If you don't have that special someone this Valentine's Day, don't despair. You're in good company. Nearly 50 percent of American adults are single. And many of them are happily single. In fact, "there are many life-long singles, especially women who are very happy, who are no less happy than ...
Are you dating or have you ever dated a psychopath? There are actually clear signs, or "tells," to use a poker analogy, according to Kevin Dutton, the Oxford psychologist and author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success . Regular readers ...
"We are stepped out upon the world stage now, with the fate of human dignity in our hands," proclaims Daniel Day Lewis in his celebrated portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln . "Blood's been spilled to afford us this moment!" Day Lewis exclaims. "Now, now, now!" While ...