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.
News of our latest interviews with experts
Today, The New York Times Science Times section published an article, "Firebrand for Science, and Big Man on Campus", about the career development of Bill Nye (aka, The Science Guy) from a beloved children's entertainer to a zealous advocate for science. As the Times article notes, this change ...
We at Big Think are thrilled to join the YouTube partner program with the launch of Big Think Mentor, a subscription channel designed to meet a growing demand among our audience to see the world-class ideas on Big Think transformed into actionable tools to improve their lives. Mentor offers ...
An "intuition pump" is the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett’s term for a thought-experiment. It usually involves a story that enables you metaphorically to think through a bigger problem. Dennett works through a number of these thought-experiments in his new book Intuition Pumps ...
In 1991, there was the so-called "Carville primary," notes Al Hunt in Bloomberg. Before any votes were cast or counted, all of the Democratic candidates "vied for the services of the hottest political consultant, James Carville." As Hunt predicts, "the equivalent this time might be the Teddy Goff ...
"Although we often stereotype givers as chumps and doormats, they turn out to be surprisingly successful." So writes Adam Grant in his celebrated new book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success . Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton who has studied the question of ...
It is hard to imagine a topic in science that Mary Roach won't touch. After all, as Carl Zimmer put it, the acclaimed science writer "put her head in a cow's stomach for you, dear reader. If you don't read [Roach's new book] Gulp, then that was all for naught. Plus, you'll miss out on the funniest ...
Thinking big involves taking risks, and taking risks requires a certain openness to failure. I believe it is an imperative to take such risks today because our personal welfare is directly tied to our ability to get smarter. The Information Industrial Complex (media and education), I believe, is ...
When we rang in the New Year and simultaneously celebrated our 5th year anniversary at Big Think, our resolution was to "Do Bigger" in 2013. What does that mean? As Big Think President Peter Hopkins recently explained: We will take Big Think as you know it today and open our doors to go ...
Five years ago today, Big Think first launched to the public. What a five years it's been! We've had some of the world's most influential, significant, radical thinkers through our doors. And these doors have changed several times over. My business partner Victoria Brown and I began this project ...
We're very fortunate at Big Think to have so many great thinkers and writers in our midst, and the woman of the moment right now is Maria Konnikova, author of the Artful Choice blog who took a timeout to write the forthcoming book, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, due out in January ...
"Oy vey!" a Big Think blogger wrote to me yesterday. "Is BigThink.com down?" Oy yey, indeed it was. And we certainly weren't alone. Amazon in recent years has moved beyond its core retail business to rent data storage and server time through its Amazon Web Services division. Companies like Big ...
In his blog post yesterday, Big Think's own Adam Lee called into question the editorial standard that would have us introduce evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa as our newest blogger. Kanazawa was forced into a blogging hiatus amidst controversy around the scientific methods and racial ...
Who could have predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts would break with the conservative block on the Supreme Court and write the majority opinion upholding the individual mandate, one of the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act? Big Think blogger Will Wilkinson did just that, and then some ...
Is 'corporate sustainability' one of those tasks that exist just to be checked off a list and assigned to a few isolated people within your organization? Is your company in the position to do more than just talk about it? Those were among the questions Big Think's Peter Hopkins addressed in a ...
Big Think hit the streets (the intersection of Wall & Broad, NYC) during the AM rush hour this Friday, May 18th with a guerilla theater piece for Facebook IPO day. It's a funny, poignant clash between worldviews on the cultural and economic implications of the rise of the social web. Facebook's ...