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.
There has been much chatter recently about the new found potential of "big data". Google NGram for example, tracks usage of words in books and Google Flu Trends does what it says on the tin. The vast quantities of data that are now available enable new possibilities for experimenting with data in a ...
The video below is a new public service announcement from the US FDA on the risks of drinking grapefruit juice when taking medication. We’ve known for over a couple of decades about the grapefruit juice interaction that affects half of all drugs to some degree, but a paper recently published ...
There are many things we can criticise the US for, but freedom of speech is not (at present) one of them. The US not only have the valuable First Amendment rights to freedom of speech but these rights have been explicitly expanded by "The Speech Law", a law with the express purpose of protecting ...
We’ve known for some time that there is a great disparity in the number of followers people have on Twitter – 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 followers, yet some have thousands. A new paper, is the first longitudinal study attempting to correlate features of Twitter users with growth in ...
Can't go over it. Can't go under it. Can't go around it. Gotta go through it. Many generations will remember with affection growing up singing the song above. This generation will be the first to have grown up in a world where keygens, crackers, tunnels and firewalls are ...
A paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest has evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions. The report is quite a heavy document so I’ve summarised the techniques below based on the ...
Evidence has emerged that a bizarre and potentially inhumane treatment which originated in the US is now being used on children in the UK. The therapy involves a caregiver holding a child down and maintaining direct eye contact for extended periods with the express intention of provoking a fit of ...
Almost a year ago I posted a blog post titled 'A Yale Professor’s One Man Rampage Against PloS, the Internet and a Belgian Research Group', covering the case of a respected researcher who became very upset about a study replicating his work and finding a negative outcome. This may have only been a ...
Last Friday Aaron Swartz committed suicide, shortly before his Federal trial was due to begin. According to the US Attorney’s press release, “if convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a ...
Aaron Swartz was (amongst many, many other things) the co-author of RSS, the fantastic technology I described only in my last blog post as the technology that should be your New Year’s resolution to adopt: “If you make one New Year’s resolution this year, make it to throw out the papers and ...
“In 800 newspaper bylines I can count on fingers and toes the ones that were actually true” - the words of Richard Peppiatt, British tabloid defector, speaking last week at a series of talks on Bad Journalism at the Centre for Inquiry. According to Peppiat, the articles he wrote were a “fiction ...
P<0.05 is the figure you will often find printed on an academic paper, that is commonly (mis)understood as indicating that the findings have a one in twenty chance of being incorrect. The phenomenon has become a somewhat universal barrier which scientists must cross but in many cases has also ...
Back in August I wrote a post covering a rash of reports on the worrying rise of bad science in TED talks. A couple of months later TED pulled the following TEDx talk after the neuroscientist Bradley Voytek posted a question about it to Quora: "Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 ...
Breaking The Taboo, the acclaimed film packed with hard hitting footage, facts, figures and interviews with former world leaders and drug tzars is now available to watch in full for free: Image Credit: Sukharevskyy Dmytro (nevodka)/Shutterstock.com
Just over a month ago I attended a debate (at Bristol Festival of Ideas) between Howard Marks, the man who at one point was the world's most prolific cannabis dealer - importing hundreds of tons of cannabis in to the UK, the US and mainland Europe, and Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday's columnist ...