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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An examination of economics, innovation, the environment and social responsibility
What’s the Big Idea? Want to scare a book publisher, a record store owner, or even a doctor? Creep up behind her and shout: disintermediation! This is the term du jour for "cutting out the middleman," which happens any time a producer of something - a writer, a band, or a pharmaceutical company ...
Our values as a society will determine which psychopharmaceuticals and (down the road) which genetic enhancement technologies we choose to develop and how we use them. That's what concerns Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, senior Bioethicist at NASA and a pioneer in the field of neuroethics. Peering into his ...
What’s the Big Idea? Last year some 212 million Americans spent over $45 billion over Black Friday Weekend. To put that in perspective, Americans spent more than the 2010 GDP of North Korea in one weekend. Sure, that represents the clear triumph of American capitalism over North Korean ...
What's the Big Idea? "We are children when we talk about the cosmic scale of energies throughout the entire universe," says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. But with a little (okay, a lot) of human ingenuity, we may one day have the ability to harness the energy of the stars. Watch here: ...
"Wildly uneven" "Fuzzy and confusing" These are not the type of reviews you want to receive if you are bringing a multimillion dollar musical production to Broadway. Words like these don't look particularly good on a Times Square marquee. These negative reviews were aimed at what appeared ...
What's the Big Idea? After the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a new arms race was joined with the Soviet Union. This arms race led to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It also led to the development of the first lightweight automatic rifle, the AK-47 ...
What's the Big Idea? Can economics explain everything? Some people have attempted to make that claim, but not Paul Krugman, who labels such a view "academic imperialism." Krugman, who won the Novel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008 for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic ...