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? As the world watched London burn under the strain of economic uncertainty this past summer, the legendary entrepreneur and art world financier Asher Edelman warned that the conflagration could spread to the U.S. "I think that you should watch very carefully for the ...
"My course is so clear and obvious that it is delightful to think how straight it is. And yet what a mountain I have to climb! It is enough to frighten anyone who had not all that most insatiable and restless energy." - Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, in a letter to her ...
What’s the Big Idea? America is in the midst of a major transition. Having enjoyed unchallenged economic leadership since the end of World War Two, we are now faced with a global marketplace in which economic power is more diffuse and interconnected than ever before. With the forces of ...
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. Today, Dr. Kaku addresses a question posed by Armand ...
What's the Big Ideas? At first glance, when it comes to pleasure, humans aren't so different from mice: we both activate the pleasure circuits in our brains by eating food, or having sex. However, in a new book by David Linden called The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods ...
What's the Latest Development? Imagine watching someone’s dream, or tapping directly into the mind of a coma patient. Berkeley scientists say they're close to doing it via fMRI and computational models which decode and reconstruct people’s dynamic visual experiences. So far, the technology ...
Economist Daniel Altman predicts that "deep factors," including endemic corruption and a Confucian business culture, will limit China's growth, causing it to surrender the top spot shortly after becoming the world's biggest economy. What's the Big Idea? Americans are optimistic by nature ...
Dr. Kevin Mitchell is a geneticist who studies neural development. In this guest post, he explains how viruses can be used to map connections in the brain. What's the Big Idea? It is hard to overstate the complexity of the brain. Not only are there tens of billions of individual nerve cells ...
What's the Big Idea? Where do our clichés about love go to die? Teenage girls and movie producers may survive on blushes and beautifully-penned letters alone, but there’s a point at which the rest of us pause and realize that no, life is not My Best Friend's Wedding, and yes, we are actually g ...
Interviewer: If you hadn’t found the theater, what do you think you might have been? David Mamet: I think it’s very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego ...
According to an estimate by the Hubble Space Telescope, there are approximately 125 billion galaxies in the universe. The Drake Equation, SETI's operational manifesto, calculates the probability that there is intelligent life beyond Earth at around 100%, and some physicists believe we'll make ...
In August, 2010, Paul Rieckhoff, Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told Big Think, "I will put all the money in my pocket right now on the fact that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will be repealed." Of course, Rieckhoff turned out to be right, and today marks the day that the military ...
SPECIAL MINISERIES: Dr. Wang Explains Your Child's Brain. What exactly is “teaching to the test”? If you’re a fan of the nationwide public school “accountability movement”, which has resulted in more frequent standardized testing at every grade level, it means teaching kids what national ...
What's the Big Idea? A good writer is a rich writer, and a rich writer is a good writer. That's how Lewis Lapham chose to memorialize Jonathan Franzen's so-called "Oprah Gaffe," that very public episode in which the author of The Corrections disparaged Winfrey's literary taste. According to ...
What's the Big Idea? In the preface to his play, The Doctor's Dilemma , George Bernard Shaw made the famous observation that all professions "are conspiracies against the laity." In short, they shield their own shortcomings from the public out of self-interest. Indeed, the protection of ...