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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A 10-week exploration of the impact of exponential technologies
The sprint to the finish line of Singularity U's Graduate Studies Program has taught me a lot about why hackathons are so effective. When it all comes down to the wire, and time is of the essence, procrastination and all other excuses get thrown out the window. While the Team Projects were formed ...
New York, 1964. The World's Fair is in full gear, as 50 million people make the trek to Queens to see what the future has in store. The exposition showcases an epic collection of consumer products, from pens to refrigerators and cars - the attendees are flooded with things to keep them busy. One of ...
There has been a lot of noise recently surronding the prospects of virtual reality. With Google Glasses being showcased last month at the Google I/O conference, it seems - at the least -augmented reality is closer than any would have predicted; but legitimate virtual reality is still an idea ...
With respect to the cosmos, mankind has just been born. Hypothetically, if our 14 billion-year-old universe were scaled down to just 10 years (for the sake of comparison), dinosaurs would have been extinct 17 days ago, our earliest relative Lucy would have been playing around on the Savannah 19 ...
Entrepreneurship is booming: we can see it in all the startup accelerators, incubators, and hackathons filling up and expanding around the world. But for every success story there are hundreds of failures. So as the trails of attempts pile up, academics have been looking into the process to ...
This past week at Singularity University has been stimulating, to the say the least. Everyone here is on the same wavelength: we’re thinking exponentially, dreaming up ways we can improve the world, and we’ve all been experiencing SU’s cross-disciplinary, future-oriented education, which I can ...
It was “Global Grand Challenges Week” at Singularity University, where 50 experts from all around the world visited us here at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley to share their insights about the core problems that plague our world. Broken up into 8 different categories, the GGCs include ...
The Matrix is real... and everyone here at NASA for the GSP has taken the red pill. If you recall in the movie, Neo is startled, puzzled, and quite frankly scared when Morpheus first introduces him to the reality of reality. But here at Singularity University, the participants have hit the ground ...
You may be familiar with Moore’s Law. The phenomenon was first described in a 1965 paper by Gordon Moore of Intel, and it spelled out the notion that computing capacity (via the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit) will double every two years. Since the idea’s inception, Moore’s ...