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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Big ideas in little doses
What's the Big Idea? Do stubborn people actually win? Maybe the reason they take such an aggressive approach every time is that it works, says Steven Pinker. The Harvard psychologist, known for his argument that human language is an evolutionary adaptation, is convinced that the best way to get ...
What's the Big Idea? Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is taking some heat from fellow Republicans due to his proposal to start "a permanent colony on the moon" that would allow us to mine precious minerals. “I think we’ve got other priorities to worry about," argued Mitt Romney. "I’m for ...
What's the Big Idea? Going to the orchestra is one of the few Eisenhower-era traditions that hasn't been resurrected for our time, even by the most retro-souled among us. Apparently drinking Scotch neat holds a kind of glamour that sitting for two hours sandwiched between a socialite and retiree ...
What do you do when your Presidential campaign is floundering and your support has collapsed in the polls? I'm not sure. That's why political strategists are paid the big bucks. The video below is what someone advised Rick Perry to do. "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian," begins the ...
Albert Pujols is probably the best hitter in baseball. But is he worth $260 million? With a World Series title under his belt, but also coming off his worst professional season (Pujols failed to hit .300 and drive in 100 runs for the first time in his 11-year career), the soon to be 32-year old ...
"Daddy, who was Alec Baldwin?" my future daughter may ask me one day. "He was a terrific actor," I will reply. "In fact, let's watch one of my favorite episodes of 30 Rock, and in a few years, I might allow you to watch Glengarry Glen Ross, but there's a lot of bad language in it." My future ...
What's the Big Idea? As Wellington said of Waterloo, his greatest victory, it was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life" (this quotation is often amended to "a damn close run thing"). So too was the U.S. Navy's engagement with the Japanese in the Second World War, particularly during ...
What's the Big Idea? Does Kepler-22b really exist? Is there life on this planet? Could we inhabit it? How would we get there? These are a few of the many questions that arose after NASA announced on Monday that a possible Earth twin had been discovered by the Kepler space mission. The planet ...
Russian President Vladimir Putin's grip on power is more tenuous than ever following big losses in last Sunday's parliamentary election. This is not surprising, since Putin does not actually have much support, says the former World Chess Champion and Russian Presidential Candidate Garry Kasparov ...
Be careful what you tweet. Just ask Ashton Kutcher, who tweeted that September 11 -- the start of the football season -- was "the greatest day of the year." More recently, Kutcher came to the defense of Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach accused of covering up the alleged sex abuse ...
by Tauriq Moosa When someone defies the odds, it’s common practice for him or her to attribute their ‘winning’ to what we might call tokens: a lucky jacket, a prayer, some new therapy. Tokens are not phenomena which directly cause success, but are merely hope made manifest. We really want to ...
Big Think seems to be involved in a lot of meme-creation these days. And two prominent examples, featuring past Big Think experts Neil deGrasse Tyson and Salman Rushdie, happen to involve the word “badass.” We are proud of these significant contributions to contemporary culture. The Neil ...
What’s the Big Idea? Wherever there’s uncertainty, magical thinking finds a foothold. People resort to tradition, gut instinct, or the nostrum of the moment to dispel the anxiety of not knowing. Industries arise to exploit the vacuum, offering concrete answers where only guesswork or ...
Oh how I wish David Foster Wallace had been my English professor. The University of Texas has recently posted the syllabus from the English 102 class he taught at Pomona College. It's immediately obvious that he took the job, and his students, utterly seriously. Interesting, too, is his choice of ...
Episode one of a miniseries on the Internet and the American Voter Following the 2008 presidential election, in which Barack Obama raised an impressive $750 million thanks in part to small online donations, it seemed that the Internet had changed politics forever. For techies and media theorists ...