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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Guest posts from thought leaders
Over the past few days, Tom Hartsfield and Alex Berezow have been mining data in an attempt to decipher what meaningful correlations exist between guns and violence, if indeed any do at all. Their analyses have been instructive and controversial, to say the least. Though there's a paucity of ...
In the human brain, 100 billion neurons are connected by 100 trillion synapses. And, really, this staggeringly complex structure is only the beginning. (Consider that there may be roughly one hundred thousand trillion electrical signals traversing the brain in one second.) Can we build a working ...
Everyone procrastinates. Sometimes it’s fun to procrastinate. Sometimes waiting until just before a deadline is very motivating. And sometimes procrastination is even necessary—as a way to put off a dreaded task until we feel more energetic, prepared, or able to do it. But sooner or later ...
Imagine a group of senior vice presidents sitting around a massive conference table in their company’s board room. The CEO suddenly resigned and it’s up to this huge and now sequestered bunch to vote in a new chief executive by a two-thirds-plus-one majority. These folks can vote up to four ...
Imagine you're at a black-tie gala. It's super fancy. Waiters slip through the chattering throng carrying collages of crackers, caviar, and cheese. Others bear trays arranged with glasses of expensive champagne. Everybody important is there: friends, colleagues, influential media persons ...
This article is an excerpt from Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman's new book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. Predicting the future is a crapshoot. When we were writing this book and interviewing people about 3D printing, we discovered that a few underlying "rules" kept coming up. People ...
It's been almost 50 years since the War on Poverty began, and it’s a legitimate question to ask why we haven’t made more progress in attacking this problem. In my view, there are three broad factors that help explain our poor record. First, stagnant or falling earnings for low-skill men since ...
Focus makes us smarter. In a recent study using mice, when their attention improved, so did their cognitive performance. The same is true for humans. In any endeavor, whether it's to beat a world record in sports or become your company's CEO, when people learn to increase their focus, they get ...
Republicans believe (mostly) that government money should be spent wisely, if spent at all. Democrats, on the other hand, believe (mostly) that it’s better to spend wisely than not. To satisfy this desire for efficiency in government, as well as equity, requires that the rate of return on ...
This post, by Tom Hartsfield, was originally published in RealClear Science's Newton blog. You can read the original here. Back in 8th grade, I hated math. Everyone hated math. Maybe the kid who kept their calculator (or slide rule, for you vintage readers) in a case didn't hate math. That kid ...
Good morning. It's January 2, 2020, the first workday of the year. As you drive to the office, the only thing predictive analytics doesn't do for you is steer the car (yet that's coming soon as well). 1. Anti-theft. As you enter your car, a predictive model establishes your identity based on ...
On February 15th, the people of planet Earth will receive a wake-up call from our Solar System. Asteroid 2012 DA14, discovered just 1 year ago, will narrowly miss hitting the Earth by only 17 thousand miles. That is about the distance the Earth travels in just 15 minutes, so this truly is a close ...
There’s a moment in Keith Richards’ recent memoir when he pauses his tale of addiction and debauchery to reflect that, once a certain number of stories about his excesses had been told and retold in public, his reputation became fixed. No countervailing or complicating evidence of moderation could ...
You can read the original here. One day in the 1970's, philosopher and space writer Frank White was flying cross-country. Watching majestic mountains, bright cityscapes, and snaking rivers stream past, he was struck with an idea: "I was looking out the window, and... the thought came ...
It’s strange to think how young the Internet is, considering its enormity and complexity, and yet how powerful it has become as a means to connect people from around the world and influence our everyday lives and society as a whole. In 1992, there was one website. Three years later, there were ...