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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In today's excerpt - the two heartbreaks of Cynthia Ann Parker. In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia was captured in a murderous raid by Comanches on her frontier family. The tragic story, and the resulting search for her, became perhaps the most famous in its time, with many Americans ...
In today's excerpt – the gold standard. In recent political debates, there have been calls for a return to the gold standard. This standard states that holders of paper money can redeem it for gold, and banks – especially the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank – are required to match a certain fixed ...
In today's excerpt – the accelerating pace of change. I began my career in financial services in the late 1970s. In my first decade in that industry, there were only a handful of new products introduced, and the number of new computer products offered to support our industry by then-dominant IBM ...
In today's excerpt – thanks to the work of Daniel Kahneman and others, we now increasingly view our cognitive processes as being divided into two systems. System 1 produces the fast, intuitive reactions and instantaneous decisions that govern most of our lives. System 2 is the deliberate type of ...
In today's excerpt – a disruption in history. Most people assume that history is a gradual continuum from the past to the present, each century being a little better and a little more populous than the prior one, with certain notable exceptions such as the so-called "dark ages". In fact, the growth ...
In today's excerpt – the alliance between the church and the Ku Klux Klan that was crucial both to enacting Prohibition and the maintaining it for thirteen years. Prohibition began in 1920 and lasted for thirteen years before it was repealed – primarily because of the tax revenues needed from ...