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.
Innovation and Creativity for the Darwinian CEO
The freewheeling, rabble-rousing Internet hacktivist collective known as Anonymous thus far has played little or no role in determining the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election. With the exception of partnering with the Occupy Movement in an attempt to mobilize voters and hold politicians ...
We already know that supercomputers, sophisticated algorithms and mathematical models are at the very heart of the modern financial markets. Now, with l'affaire Knight Capital we've just seen how robot traders and rogue algorithms could potentially take down Wall Street. In a span of less than an ...
We tend to think of the brain as a giant lump of gray matter, as a marvelously complex structure that controls consciousness and intelligence. But what if the human brain is just a giant 3D grid, with neurons hooked together in an orderly structure of repeating parallel and perpendicular lines ...
Now that space exploration has been turned over to the private sector, we’re seeing a run of new space innovation that’s unequalled in history. Just two months after Elon Musk’s celebrated commercial spaceflight, space daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped nearly 96,000 feet from the stratosphere ...
This semester when college students return to campus at America’s leading universities, they may be surprised to find out that the men and women teaching them subjects like Machine Learning or Listening to World Music or Quantum Mechanics are becoming academic rock stars with global followings that ...
After years of hearing about the Social Media Revolution, many of the rebellious, counter-culture figures are starting to disappear to the sidelines as the big money Wall Street investors and traditional media guys take over. The companies that we thought were going to completely topple traditional ...
Thanks to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and computer processing ability, machines are now evolving faster than humans. At some point within the next decade, according to proponents of the Singularity, machines will become so intelligent that they will start making decisions for us ...
Last summer, the fastest way to spend $50 in America was to fill up at the pump. This summer, the fastest way to blow through $50 might be streaming videos and music from the Web to your smart phone. From cable companies to wireless providers, the companies that provide the tubes of the Internet ...
If ideas are the currency of the future, then books are still the best way to trade these ideas with others. To celebrate the 600th blog post of Endless Innovation, I've put together a summer reading list of ten books for innovators. These books feature some of the big ideas that are winning in the ...
The next housing boom will be far more radical than the last housing boom. Instead of moving middle-class families into McMansions they can’t possibly afford, this next housing boom will be radical because it will take low-income families from developing markets and move them into affordable ...
DARPA – the government organization that brought you the Internet – is back, this time with an audacious five-year, $110 million research initiative to militarize cyberspace. Called Plan X, DARPA's plan reflects a disturbing tendency these days – the willingness of governments – including your very ...
It used to be that the word "doctor" brought to mind an image of a kindly old man in a small office with a stethoscope, but now it conjures up an image of an app on a smartphone or a high-end digital device transmitting medical information over the Internet. As digital innovations continue to cross ...
Would you exchange your personal privacy for an Internet that’s not boring? Companies like Airtime - which launched to a mix of acclaim, hype and skepticism last week - certainly hope so. They hope that you will allow certain aspects of your Internet experience to be shared and monitored in real ...
The size of the Internet just expanded exponentially on June 6, a date also known as World IPv6 Launch Day. Internet Service Providers and leading Internet companies like Facebook and Google are migrating to a new, parallel Internet that supports 340 trillion trillion trillion (yes, that's 2^128 ...
There’s a four-week mission to Mars taking place right now, complete with a Mars landing module known as the LEM, a full-size Mars rover, a mobile quarantine unit, a bio lab and an interplanetary excavation unit. Only the “mission” is not actually taking place on Mars, it’s taking place on ...