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.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Using Cognitive Science to Unleash Your Hidden Creativity
One of the hallmarks of a good story is the element of surprise. A good story leads us down a path of expectations, slowly building tension until an unexpected plot twist catches us off guard. Mystified, we reinterpret the story with the new details, taking delight in how the storyteller managed to ...
Sometime in 1952, the American experimental musician John Cage put the finishing touches on a composition that challenged the definition of music. It was a three-part movement written for any instrument or combination of instruments. He called it four minutes and thirty-three seconds (4:33) and ...
This post was originally posted on my previous blog Why We Reason. For a long time people thought that the self was unified and eternal. It’s easy to see why. We feel like we have an essence; we grow old, gain and lose friends, and change preferences but we are the same person from day one ...
The following is an upcoming post for CreativityPost.com. It riffs on themes I discussed in my previous post on humor. If you have not already, check out CreativityPost.com. There's great content on creativity, innovation and cognitive science. In 2002, professor of psychology Richard Wiseman ...
In his autobiography, The Moon’s A Balloon, British actor David Niven writes about an instance when the American playwright and screenwriter Charles MacArthur approached Charlie Chaplin for advice on how to improve the classic banana peel sequence, in which a person slips on a banana peel and falls ...
Hello readers. I've been on vacation for the last several days. Here's an old post from my previous blog WhyWeReason.com to fill the void. It's about a paper by the NYU neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, who argues that cognitive science needs to rethink how it understands emotions. In ...
“How do Americans spend their leisure time?” That question was posed by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his 2010 book How Pleasure Works. The answer, Bloom says, is “participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want we retreat to the imagination.” Of ...
The summer of 1975 was a rough time for beachgoers at Amity Island. Citizens of the Long Island getaway became terrorized when a shark devoured a young woman and two young boys in the span of a few days. Luckily, three brave men – Brody, Quint and Hooper – traveled out to sea in a small boat ...
Humans are a distractible bunch. We’re easily seduced by ads and offers, memes and tweets. When we’re not focused on useless gimmicks and irrelevant social chatter our minds drift into the clouds. According to a recent study, people let their mind wander about forty-seven percent of the time they ...
The following is a forthcoming article for CreativityPost.com When Radiohead sat down to record the follow-up to their 1995 album, The Bends, lead singer Thom Yorke said he wanted to create a record with, “an atmosphere that’s perhaps a bit shocking when you first hear it.” So the band traded in ...
Portions of the following were taken from an article I wrote for ScientificAmerican.com in April. Reason appears to have fallen on hard times. Since the 1970s, psychologists have accumulated a long list of cognitive biases that illustrate all of the ways we screw up. More recently, behavioral ...
Breakthrough ideas don’t happen overnight. Origins of Species was published in 1859, 28 years after Darwin first boarded HMS Beagle; James Joyce spent seventeen years writing Finnegans Wake; and when Edison filed his patent for the light blub, he famously quipped, “We now know a thousand ways not ...
It’s difficult to categorize Siri Hustvedt. She is, first and foremost, a writer and a thinker. Her well-known novels include What I Loved and The Sorrows Of An American. They explore, among various other topics, the nature of perception and identity. But her prose goes beyond the typical themes ...
Human evolution is puzzling. Around 45,000 years ago, for no obvious reason, our species took off. Our technology rapidly progressed, populations thrived and we started painting and crafting instruments. All of this and more culminated in our first civilizations. From there, we started growing food ...
One of the great mysteries of art is why it exists. Although our desire to create and enjoy art is so widespread that it appears as natural as eating or reproducing -– nearly every culture draws, dances, sings, recites poetry and tells stories -– the origins of human aesthetics are not clear-cut ...