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
In her recent TED Book, Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists, Ainissa Ramirez makes an impassioned call for a recommitment to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in our schools and throughout our society. The post below is an excerpt from ...
“The Super Bowl shows what million-dollar players and coaches are truly made of when the stakes matter most,” says leadership coach Stephen Miles, founder and CEO of The Miles Group . “The Ravens-49ers game in particular offers business leaders some great lessons – especially since with today’s ...
Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, RealClearScience Newton Blog. The original is here. "Is scientific genius extinct?" That's the intriguing question posed by psychologist Dean Keith Simonton in Wednesday's publication of Nature. It's a sweeping inquiry to be sure -- one ...
This discussion must start by distinguishing between the cost and price of college. Costs per student, in terms of real (inflation-adjusted) resources spent, have actually increased very little in the last 25 years, at least in public colleges and universities. Prices, however, have climbed at ...
The masses are taking shots at reviled cyclist Lance Armstrong. If you want to jump on the bandwagon, that's your business. Although if you do, you're falling into the same trap that he did. You're misunderstanding or trying to fight through your own feelings about something (in this case ...
Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, RealClearScience Newton Blog. The original is here. Imagine a world where objects can be in two different places at the same time and cats are locked in sealed containers with flasks of poison and objects that spew radiation. In this ...
Last October, a colleague and I speculated on how a special, powerful form of predictive analytics would revolutionize presidential campaigning -- and, if successful, how it might be poorly received by the public thereafter. In our work, he and I focus more on financial, marketing, and online ...
In the first few months of 1963, the Mona Lisa was seen by nearly two million people in New York and Washington DC. Shipped to the United States on a diplomatic mission – escorted by the French culture minister and received by President John F. Kennedy – the painting did little to assuage Franco ...
Editors' Note: On New Year's Day, 2013, protests erupted in China's Guangdong province over government censorship of a newspaper, Southern Weekly. In highly unusual show of resistance, the paper's reporters demonstrated in the streets, protesting the rewriting of a New Year's editorial by the ...
As widely expected after Ambassador Susan Rice’s withdrawal from consideration, President Barack Obama has nominated Senator John Kerry as his new Secretary of State to succeed Hillary Clinton. A new era for a quieter e-diplomacy? Possibly quieter but certainly not less visible, or innovative ...
As speculations over the future of Hillary Clinton mount, her tenure at the U.S. Department of State is – seemingly – drawing to a conclusion, leaving behind a very distinguishable legacy: a new way to look at diplomacy through innovation and the eyes of the people. Secretary Clinton has changed ...
It’s hard to know what leads lemmings to race willfully to their own demise. But I’ve come to believe that the suicidal tendencies embedded in American tax and fiscal policy arise directly from the teachings of modern economic theorists. One of the first lessons of introductory economics is a ...
What's the Big Idea? The evolution of the football helmet is a cautionary tale of how inventions can cause new and potentially problematical human behaviors. Football helmets were initially designed to prevent skull fractures. Imagine that an eggshell is your skull and the yolk is your brain ...
What do Sir Richard Branson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Paul Mitchell founder John Paul DeJoria; bestselling author/speakers Jack Canfield, Gregg Braden, Barbara Marx Hubbard; three-time Nobel nominated Dr. Scilla Elworthy; philanthropist James Caan; former financial fund manager Alison Poithier ...
Bob Costas’ Sunday Night “perspective,” his celebrated half-time denouncement of American gun culture, wasn’t just dissonant hectoring. It wasn’t just a burlesque of Murrow or Cosell (USA Today's forced, but mewed association). No, it was an accidental breaking of the fourth wall of State Terrorism ...