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.
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Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Radical ideas from serious thinkers
You may want to think twice before your next visit to the doctor's office. According to Dr. Barbara Starfield's now-famous study, iatrogenic deaths (those resulting from treatment by physicians or surgeons) are the third leading cause of mortality in the United States, resulting in the loss of 225 ...
Dr. Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, tells Big Think that we should develop a "Google-like" chip to implant in our brains that would use our neurons like a search engine and enhance human memory. "Human memory is not all that efficiently organized as compared to computer ...
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people." - NRA slogan Whether or not you agree with the NRA's argument against gun control, it is worth noting that it relies on a common-sense legal principle that the tools of mankind's creation do not perpetrate crimes. After all, objects such as guns hold ...
Less than two years into President Barack Obama's first term, talk of the 2012 presidential election is already upon us. In addition to his presidential duties, Obama must now begin preparing a massive re-election campaign, potentially taking his attention away from the country's business. This is ...
August may be behind us, but that doesn't mean we've stopped thinking dangerously here at Big Think. At the end of last month, we asked readers to submit their own dangerous ideas—ideas that we may have overlooked or that perhaps seemed too dangerous to put into print—and the results are in! Of the ...
Dr. Norman Fost, director of the bioethics program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tells Big Think that we should stop all of the sanctimony and allow pro athletes to take whatever performance-enhancing drugs they please. “Drug-testing policies in professional sports are completely ...
With yesterday's blog post—our 30th dangerous idea—on taxing fat people (to incentivize the obese to lose weight and save the public-health system money), Big Think officially ends The Month of Thinking Dangerously. The purpose of the month was to stimulate discussion about 30 radical ideas that ...
If Americans were paid to eat less and exercise more they might be motivated to lose some weight—and save us a bundle on health care—says Dr. Barry M. Popkin, director of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Interdisciplinary Center for Obesity. According to a report released by the Center ...
We are currently in the midst of earth's "sixth great extinction." For the past 10,000 years, existing species have been dying out faster than new species have been evolving, say scientists. Big Think expert and famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has estimated the annual species extinction rate to ...
What do God, Dr. Frankenstein, and Lady Gaga have in common? They are all names that geneticist-cum-media-sensation Craig Venter has been called since announcing in May that he had created the first synthetic life form. In countless press interviews and articles, Venter detailed how he had ...
Using lasers to manipulate the weather sounds like science fiction, but researchers at the University of Geneva have done just that. In May, Dr. Jerome Kasparian unveiled the results of a study which used a high-powered laser to simulate rain cloud formations. Kasparian told Big Think that the ...
It's been over 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, yet the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), a military group which was originally created to defend Western Europe from Russia, continues to exist, with 28 member states pledged to collectively defend one another in the face of outside ...
“Primary elections have turned out to be one of the causes that contribute to the extreme polarization of politics today,” says Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at the New York University School of Law. “The people who show up for primary elections tend to be much more extreme ...
"Software should always be free because all users of software deserve freedom," says Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, and a longtime activist. But he's not talking about "free" in the sense of free beer—Stallman tells Big Think his definition of free ...
"Is the purpose of public education to nurse students or to teach them?" asks Brian Crosby, a twenty-year veteran high school English teacher and the founder of the American Education Association, in his book Smart Kids, Bad Schools . Crosby tells Big Think we need to decrease funding for special ...