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
As the Big Three—Google, Bing, and Yahoo—make subtle changes to their search algorithms, a new crop of search engine upstarts are rethinking what it means to search altogether, with the hopes of transforming your relationship to information: 1. Recorded Future - Search is about scanning through ...
This idea was suggested by Big Think Delphi Fellow and Microsoft researcher Meredith Ringel Morris. What's the Big Idea? In the next four years, we will create more information than in all the years of human history combined. Clearly, we must come up with a more effective system for filtering ...
This idea was contributed by Big Think Delphi Fellow Douglas Kenrick. What’s the Big Idea? A new model for understanding human decision-making, called Deep Rationality, acknowledges the irrationality of human decision-making but suggests that it might be rooted in evolution. Why Is It ...
The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that if authors could infuse their stories with enough "semblance of truth," readers would suspend their disbelief of the clearly fabricated tale. Almost 200 years later, actor and entrepreneur Jeffrey Wright tells Big Think that starting a ...
A premature announcement can still be an exciting thing. Just witness what happened on the blog of Columbia University Phycisist and Big Think Expert Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog this week, which blew up when an anonymous poster offered up a supposedly leaked memo from scientists working at ...
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people." - NRA slogan Whether or not you agree with the NRA's argument against gun control, it is worth noting that it relies on a common-sense legal principle that the tools of mankind's creation do not perpetrate crimes. After all, objects such as guns hold ...
This idea was suggested by Big Think Delphi Fellow Aydogan Ozacan, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. Cell phones have long been touted as a tool for political and economic freedom, particularly in parts of the developing world. Entrepreneurs have found many innovative ...
What's the Big Idea? With tuition spiraling upwards as the cost of learning paradoxically plummets, higher education is on an unsustainable course. Why Is This Groundbreaking? The modern university has, to a great extent, remained unchanged for 1000 years, despite massive changes in the ...
The idea of "non-traditional" higher education, like online universities, is gaining a lot of traction today. Count author Anya Kamenetz among its growing list of advocates. Not only is college too expensive, as she argued in her book Generation Debt , but it has become more or less a "credential ...
What's the News? This week Japan raised the severity of the Fukushima meltdown to a 7, the highest on the international scale, and admitted that the total amount of radiation emitted from the still-leaking reactors could ultimately surpass that of Chernobyl. They also disclosed the news that 28 ...
NPR has called Robert Redford's new film "a dramatized lecture on civil liberties." The Conspirator centers on the case of Mary Surratt, who ran the Washington D.C. boarding house where John Wilkes Booth stayed. Surratt was tried and convicted for her role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln ...
It's been a bad week for drones. First, Pakistan demanded the U.S. halt drone attacks aimed at militants in the country's northwest region. Then came the news that the military is investigating the deaths of two servicemen killed in Afghanistan, which may have been the first-ever U.S. casualties ...
What's the Big Idea: Scientists with the U.S. Navy last week unveiled its new 15KW ship-bound laser weapon, which caused a ship 1 mile away to burst into flames. This is just the latest in a series of events that point to laser technology as the future of ballistics weapons. Dr. Evil would be ...
What's the Big Idea? Computer storage and software are already migrating to the cloud, and soon processing power will go virtual as well, making our mobile devices as powerful as supercomputers. What's the Breakthrough? Much of your computing already takes place on the cloud, and you ...
"We're faced with puzzles every day in life," says Will Shortz. He should know—he's the only person to hold a degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles. He's also been The New York Times's Crossword Editor for almost 20 years. "With a crossword or Sudoku or any other kind of human-made ...