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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A critical sideswipe into the world of scientific controversy with a focus on the murky waters of the science of the mind.
I think we should all take a moment to consider the news that everyone who continues to protest in Istanbul’s Taksim square is to be considered a terrorist. Let’s just consider what might happen if something similar ever happened in your home country. Now consider the implications of this in a ...
I was pretty disappointed to read a post from fellow Big Think blogger, Steven Mazie. The backlash has been substantial, he has already had to rehash. His post begins with a cute picture of a cat, but the post is anything but cute. Mazie makes the following argument: “Imagine if every one of ...
I'm not sure where to begin on the ethics of this. On the up side, inspiring kids to learn about technology such as this could directly lead to promising careers resulting in the next generation of treatments. On the down side, we're seeing completely uncontrolled experimentation on the brains of ...
A spine chilling new documentary addresses the myriad of new tools for surveillance that are now being put to use in the the UK's capital city. We learn of the case of a French man whose home was raided and who still remains on a terrorist watch list eight years later because algorithms in ...
With the Welsh measles epidemic only now beginning to slow I thought now would be a good time to repost Daryl Cunningham 's fantastic explainer (below) on how we came to be in this mess. Interestingly, a report by Margaret McCartney published in the British Medical Journal has stated that it ...
Matthew Hankins over at Psychologically Flawed has harvested an amusing list of quotes from studies that failed to find a significant result: a borderline significant trend (p=0.09) a clear trend (p<0.09) a clear, strong trend (p=0.09) a decreasing trend (p=0.09 ...
Daniel Dennett has posted a fantastic set of "seven tools for thinking" in an article in the Guardian that has gone so viral that if you haven't seen it yet, then you must be doing the internet wrong. Perhaps the most novel involves hitting CTRL-F: "in this age of simple searching by computer ...
Can experimental findings look too good to be true? Last week I wrote a blog post about some experiments showing a counterintuitive finding regarding how the need to urinate affects decision making. It’s since been brought to my attention that these experiments (along with dozens of others) have ...
A couple of years ago Dr Mirjam Tuk won an IgNobel prize for the paper “Inhibitory Spill-Over: Increased Urinating Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains" in Psychological Science. Tuk recently discussed her research at Imperial College Science Festival. You might think that your ...
Mike Taylor over at the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog created the wonderful flowchart above to help researchers decide whether to post in an open access journal. A few months ago the British Government made the tremendous step forward of announcing that government funded research ...
Update 13/05/13 12PM: The Guardian have now corrected the article to place David Eagleman's quote in appropriate context. 1.55PM: The paragraph has now been cut completely with the following note "A paragraph that misrepresented the views of the neuroscientist David Eagleman has been removed. The ...
There has been much focus over recent years, on brain machine interfaces (BMI) allowing for the direct control of a computer by electrodes placed on or near the brain. Unfortunately a clinically useful, cost effective solution doesn't seem to be on the horizon as far as BMI's are concerned and ...
Last week a paper ($) was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that is rocking the world of neuroscience. The crack team of researchers including neuroscientists, psychologists, geneticists and statisticians analysed meta-analyses of neuroscience research to determine the statistical power of ...
The Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin has just released a free web-app that will denoise and enlarge photos in a heartbeat to an extent that according to the authors, may have never been seen before. "Compared with other photo-enhancement algorithms, we ...
Last night Ben Goldacre appeared on BBC Newsnight (viewable from UK ip addesses or portals only, for the next 7 days) discussing the ongoing havoc caused by the MMR scare in the form of a major outbreak in the UK of a disease that was on its way to being eradicated. Ben Goldacre once again ...