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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Guest posts from thought leaders
Editor's Note: Today, in honor of World Water Day, we're publishing this guest post from Doc Hendley, the founder of Wine to Water, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing clean water to the nearly one billion people lack access to clean water. The water crisis is one of the largest and yet ...
There are many explanations for today’s uncertain economy. But Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University has advanced an analysis that’s starting to resonate. In a recent article, Stiglitz says that our problem is “rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we ...
Editor's Note: Dennis N.T. Perkins is an explorer and author of Leading at The Edge, Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition. "For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and ...
Eastern Europe isn’t known as a mecca for healthy living. Those who haven’t visited Eastern Europe might still imagine that it’s filled with smoking teenagers and obese babushkas. Although that still exists, Eastern Europeans have some healthy practices that we could all learn from. For example ...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Dr. Francine Shapiro, a senior research fellow at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, director of the EMDR Institute, and founder of the non-profit EMDR-Humanitarian Assistance Programs. Shapiro was a recipient of the International ...
News of ongoing economic uncertainty surrounds us. In delivering his semiannual monetary policy report to Congress recently in Washington, U.S. Chairman Ben Bernanke urged drastic reduction in the government’s long-term deficit. "The United States is on an unsustainable fiscal path looking out ...
Meet the Living History Near You After toiling over researching and writing a screenplay about George Orwell struggling to publish Animal Farm, I was stunned to discover a first edition of Orwell’s masterpiece in my family. Not just any first edition—this book was printed and distributed in ...
The line between work and play is becoming increasingly blurred in companies all across America today. To illustrate that point, technology industry research firm Gartner estimates that by 2014 approximately 70 percent of large enterprises will use game techniques for at least one business ...
It’s almost time for baseball again, and so I’ve been thinking about the very best pitchers in the game. In order to sustain their success on the mound, they all seem to have a complete arsenal of pitches – fastball, curveball, slider, change-up, and maybe a knuckleball. But, just as importantly ...
In this guest post, David Bellos, director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, demolishes the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. New Yorkers have more words for coffee than Eskimos do for snow, he says. The number of New Yorkers who can say "good morning" in any of ...
What is the Big Idea? Here’s a thought: the Middle East is one of the most resource- and culturally rich, geo-strategic and, alas, unstable pieces of ‘real estate’ on earth. Evidently, it is also a region whose leaders remain largely oblivious to the great potential of the Middle East as an ...
Fact-checkers were quick to observe how thoroughly Rick Santorum misread John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on religion and politics when the Republican contender declared his nausea over JFK's message on the Sunday talk shows last weekend. As Brooks Johnson wrote at the Huffington Post: Rick ...
Nation of polyglots The complexity of slovenščina (the Slovenian language) isn’t the main reason few try to learn it; the real reason nobody tries to learn it is that Slovenians usually speak your native language. Within Europe, Slovenians come in third in speaking a foreign language ...
Maer Roshan, author of Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music's Most Controversial Icon, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Fix. Previously he was deputy of New York Magazine, editorial director of Talk, features editor of Interview, founder of QW, and founder and ...
In Acts of God and Man: Ruminations on Risk and Insurance, Michael Powers examines how risk impacts our lives, health, and possessions and how we can go about analyzing the uncertainty. In the following excerpt from the book, Powers discusses the morbidity principle: In today's business world ...