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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Technologies that amplify the best of human nature
What’s the big idea? There is no shortage of online tools to help us research restaurants, track up-to-the-minute news and even plan out our zombie escape routes, yet there are very few tools that can help us research, track and plan our own happiness. One of the few that does exist is Happstr, an ...
Do you know what is in your digital dossier? Since you began to have a life on the Web, data has been accruing about the habits and interests of your online life. The generation of young people emerging in the digital age have the unique experience of having the entirety of their lives immersed in ...
What’s the Big Idea? The average consumer associates 3M with tape – a product so integral to our daily lives that we barely notice it anymore. But in 1925, as an alternative to the unwieldy, glue-covered sheets of paper it made obsolete, the product was a stroke of genius. In fact, 3M is ...
Numerous studies have shown us how important sleep can be. Not only does it revitalize our bodies, it also gives the brain time to sort through all the information it has received throughout our hectic day. Sleep deprivation, and a lack of quality sleep, can lead to weight problems, high blood ...
There are approximately 105,000 people currently on the waiting list for solid organ transplant in the United States. 18 of those people die every day. These deaths are due entirely to the fact that there are far more people on the waiting list than there are available organs. Kidney transplant ...
Upon awakening this morning, and for no discernable reason, my first thought focused on religion, and why there is more disdain among the religious, of religions that are not their own, than there is of the devil in any religion. Such scorn seems an utter impossibility given that all religions ...
Jason Silva is an optimist. With a capital O. His optimism hits you full force the moment you meet him – the broad, beaming grin, the reassuring handshake . . . no, before that, in the form of multiple enthusiastic exclamation points in his every email. More specifically, he’s optimistic about the ...
I think the internet is a connection machine. It connects us with information and transactions and actions, but especially it connects us with each other... If you don’t start from an assumption of faith in your fellow man and woman, then I don’t think you believe in the value of ...
The most creative solutions to difficult problems often seem to come out of nowhere. The mysterious nature of the “sudden flash of insight” has given rise to the myth of inspiration – the idea that brilliant ideas are visited upon us by some mysterious force or deity. That if your muse is being ...
Four years ago, Facebook had 100 million users. Today, it has close to a billion. It’s tough to remember a time when every article on the internet wasn’t covered with share buttons, or when you couldn't "like" something by clicking a little thumbs-up icon. Social networking continues to evolve ...
What is the Big Idea? Young people today are more connected and wired than any generation before them. But is this good or bad? People aged 18-34 have an average of 319 online connections, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. That’s compared to an average of 198 connections for ...
What's the Big Idea? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson believes in the power of science -- so much so that he gets hate mail for it. From children. As director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Tyson made the controversial decision to remove references to ...
What's the Big Idea? Around half of the world's population currently lives in urban settings, and it has been projected to increase to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. The challenge of taking care of all these future city inhabitants will be enormous. Will we see the proliferation of ...
What’s the big idea? Anyone who doubts that the Internet has the potential to bring people together should take a closer look at Neighborgoods, a service that helps users share goods with people living nearby. At first blush, Neighborgoods sounds like it’s just a service for penny pinchers, but ...
It has been 130 years since the first practical light bulbs began to light up the world. In 1881, the Savoy Theatre in the City of Westminster, London was fitted with incandescent light bulbs, becoming the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Since then, there ...