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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Innovation always begins with a crazy idea. And so it was with the cell phone. The following timeline highlights the key developments in the cell phone's development into a smart technology. In 1843 Micheal Faraday, an English chemist and physicist, was derided as a "crackpot" for his research ...
Nanotechnology conferences make strange bedfellows. Or at least that was the case at a 2002 NanoBusiness conference I attended in New York City that was chaired by Newt Gingrich. Also in attendance was Ray Kurzweil, who told the conference that nanorobots "will enter the human brain and replace ...
The burgeoning commercial space industry has made major advances since the end of the Cold War, benefiting from the increased willingness of the governments of the United States and Russia to open up space to commercial enterprises. The following events represent key moments in the ...
Game theory is the science of strategy. Put another way it’s about "anticipating how others will respond to what you are doing and realizing that you can actually change what they are doing," as Barry Nalebuff, Professor of Management at Yale School of Management, describes in his Big Think ...