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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What's the Big Idea? Deb Roy says he created "the largest home video collection in the world." Roy is an engineer who ventured into the areas of linguistics and childhood development hoping to understand the social context around words. So Roy recorded his son to see how he learned his first ...
Sponsored by: Ethan Philbrick grew up on Nantucket and has been playing music voraciously since he was 4 years old. Philbrick, who is currently completing graduate work in performance studies at NYU, has played music in a variety of contexts all over the world: from Latin America, to ...
What's the Big Idea? According to physician and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the major problem with health care in the U.S. is the country spends twice as much on health care as the average developed country and gets an outcome that is only half as good. Sponsored by: If we ...
Sponsored by: What's the Big Idea? "Why does Harvard teach French?" That's how education innovator Adam Glick began his talk at The Nantucket Project, a festival of ideas held on Nantucket, Massachusetts this month. As tuition costs continue to skyrocket, parents and students are ...
Sponsored by: The Nantucket Project, a festival of ideas held on Nantucket, Massachusetts this month, featured some major financial heavyweights including Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, Larry Summers, Former Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard University and Hedge Fund ...
Sponsored by: With the global financial crisis ongoing, the concept of “short-termism” has emerged as one underlying explanation for our current woes. As the argument goes, the increasing emphasis on quarterly reports and returns can drive CEOs and investors to make decisions that are ...
Sponsored by: Ray Kurzweil is an expert at predicting the future. Some of his career highlights include foreseeing the fall of the Soviet Union, the invention of the Internet and a computer beating a man at chess. So what will the coming decades hold for us? In tracking our progress in the ...
In 2003, Schering-Plough was burning through cash at the rate of a billion dollars a year. Profits were down 72%. And the company's problems went deeper than productivity: exclusive patents on revenue-driving drugs such as Claritin were about to expire, while legal battles - including the largest ...