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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News of our latest interviews with experts
In the second round of Big Think's Farsight 2011 event, Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Bing of using Google search data for improving its search results. Dr. Harry Shum, a former professor, resented being called a "cheat" and responded by claiming that Bing is simply putting to ...
First off in Big Think's Farsight 2011 Conference is Clarium Capital founder and original Facebook investor Peter Thiel. "It is difficult to produce a new search company," says Thiel. "Bing has 24% market share, but as far as I can tell it's still not breaking even." The trouble with search, as ...
In an elaborate sting operation months in the making, Google has reportedly caught Bing cheating off its search results. And the timing could not come at a more inopportune time: top Google and Bing execs are scheduled to meet today in San Francisco at the Big Think event Farsight 2011: Beyond the ...
Search is no longer the simple act of typing words into a text box. New user interfaces and mobile devices are expanding the web into all aspects of daily life, and even changing the way we think. An explosion of innovation has allowed us to dream big about the role of robotics and Artificial ...
Since you're reading it on the Internet—in a blog, no less—it just might be. This week Big Think sits down with journalist Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous 2008 Atlantic article ("Is Google Making Us Stupid?") that spurred widespread debate over technology's impact on cognition and attention ...
For a disorder that affects 1 in every 110 American children and 1 in every 70 American boys, there are a surprising number of misconceptions about autism. Study after study has shown that vaccines do not cause the disorder, yet some parents still refuse to vaccinate their children out of unfounded ...
Taste is both a sense and a preference; a gustatory pleasure and a social inquiry of what's beautiful, proper, unique and stylish. What is taste on a neurological level and why is it that so many people find some tasty foods and tasteful combinations to be so appealing—and others disgusting? As ...
There is a point in every child's development where he begins to realize that the content of his parents' minds is different than that in his own, says author Malcolm Gladwell. Yet adults often forget this fundamental realization, says Gladwell. "We always fall back on this notion that the rest of ...
In 15 to 20 years, says futurist Ray Kurzweil, a biotechnology revolution will yield powerful ways for us to reprogram our genes. Our bodies will be altered on the genetic level so that we don't contract diseases, we will be able to slow down, stop, and eventually reverse the aging process. A ...
Since branding Wall Street's pre-eminent investment bank, Goldman Sachs with the epithet "vampire squid," Rolling Stone correspondent Matt Taibbi has made quite a name for himself in the mainstream American media. Despite the popularity of Taibbi's caustic commentary, few realize his nose for ...
From the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times to CNN's The Situation Room, President Jimmy Carter's recent claim on Big Think that America is in fact ready to elect a gay Commander-in-Chief sometime "in the near future" created quite the media stir. However, as political commentator Andrew Sullivan ...
For most people, social networking consists of status updates, virtual cows, and bizarre Kanye tweets. But actor and philanthropist Edward Norton believes that social networking can truly change the world, which is why he launched the micro-fundraising site Crowdrise that harnesses the power of the ...
Today we're happy to announce that all Big Think videos are now viewable on the iTouch, iPhone, and iPad. Simply access BigThink.com through your Safari browser and enjoy all of our content from any device using the iOS operating system.
As evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa explains during his Big Think interview, many of humankind's most important psychological traits stopped evolving over 10,000 years ago. Today, many of our unconscious biases and behaviors can be understood as remnant artifacts of our natural hunter ...
When students ask Sally Blount how she became the first female dean of an internationally renowned U.S. business school, she warns them not to look at her career for any insight on the well-worn path to success. "A) I was a woman, B) I was a social psychologist rather than an economist, and C) I ...