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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Big ideas in little doses
If the Russian multimillionaire and former online media mogul Dmitry Itskov has his way, we will be able to trade our bodies in for holograms and have computerized brains in 32 short years. At the Global Future 2045 conference in New York City, Itskov unveiled a timeline for achieving ...
Taking questions from readers online at The Guardian today, whistleblower Edward Snowden said the government can't stop the truth from getting out, even if he is jailed or murdered. Snowden is a former NSA contractor who is the source of Glenn Greenwald's stories about a government data ...
Before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he first had to win the so-called "Carville primary" in 1991. The reward for winning this behind-the-scenes contest was the services of the hottest political consultant at the time, James Carville. "The equivalent this time might be the Teddy Goff ...
Two of the philosophers will have their heads removed and placed in a vat of liquid nitrogen. A colleague of theirs decided to pay more to have his whole body left intact. The three Oxford academics - Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstron - will be stored after death at a cryogenic ...
David Simon, the creator and head writer for the HBO series The Wire, has written one of the most cogent responses to what he sees as hyperbolic reports in the media about the NSA Intercepts. He writes: Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all ...
"We really are close to freeing ourselves from the struggle for subsistence," writes Robert de Neufville on his new blog Anthropocene. In other words, poverty is more a product of inequality than "real scarcity." So if we are able to create enough wealth for everyone on the planet to live full ...
What's the latest development? Through a series of leaks reported mainly in scoops by The Guardian and The Washington Post this past week, we have seen reports about The Federal Government's current surveillance programs which are shocking in nature, scope, and novelty. First, it was revealed ...
There were two very interesting things about a recent Pew Research Center study -- the contents of the report and the type of reactions it received. First the findings: working mothers are the breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households with children. Now here's a reaction from the conservative ...
The contents of the Voyager Golden Record -- a collection of natural sounds, spoken greetings from 55 languages, and musical recordings ranging from Senegalese percussion to Chuck Berry to Bach -- is a carefully-curated representation of human culture and the human environment that was sent to ...
“There is no fighting in the war room!” –Doctor Strangelove While we are at war with an abstract concept, with Terror, with a word, it seems like we should have a rigorous definition of that word. I would prefer that the decision of who is worthy of justified killing be decided in The Pentagon ...
“Turkish leader says protests will not stop plans for park,” read a New York Times headline Sunday. Meanwhile, throughout Istanbul, Ankara, and dozens of other cities across Turkey, Turkish citizens continue to pour into the streets for the fourth straight day in a massive, nationwide protest that ...
In the spirit of maintaining an open mind, and in an attempt to purge myself of past prejudices, I will be re-reading The Great Gatsby this weekend. After all, this is the perfect time of year to read Gatsby, as Big Think blogger Andrea Chalupa pointed out in this recent tribute, noting that ...
The legacy of the Victorian era - the time defined by Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until her death in 1901 - is a mixed bag. It gave us Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, unprecedented advances in science and engineering, the musical theatre of Gilbert and Sullivan, the poetry of Robert ...
Last month President Obama launched the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative to enable scientists to create a dynamic picture of brain function. As Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, writes on BRAINfeedback.nih.gov ...
"There is an electricity transmitted between a performer and a live audience," says Los Angeles performance artist, Dawn Kasper. "The exchange between the performer and the audience is powerful, intimate and specific." That is distinctly different from the act of making a video in the privacy of ...