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.
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Big ideas in little doses
The New York Times offered up a primer on the four-decade battle royal between the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation schools. The occasion, of course, was the impending face-off between IBM's Watson Computing System and the human Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutte. The ...
The rise of the machines is upon us—the rise of machine-to-machine connectivity, that is. The next stage of the Internet's development is the "Web of Things." Simply put, this means that the normal, everyday things—appliances, buildings, cars—will be hooked into the web and able to transmit and ...
Adam Gopnik takes no prisoners in surveying the latest technology books in The New Yorker this week. For one thing, Gopnik discovers that, paradoxically, all these new books amount to "a series of books explaining why books no longer matter." And from this "ever expanding literature" Gopnik ...
"Signaling is an attempt to understand how information gets transferred in a market environment where the person on the selling side knows something about what they’re selling that the buying side perceives imperfectly," Nobel Laureate economist Michael Spence tells Big Think. Sounds drab ...
The word "cure" often gets in the way of autism research, says Gerald Fischbach, Scientific Director of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. "I don’t know of any neuropsychiatric disorder other than an infection that has been cured," he says. But that news is not as pessimistic as it ...
Americans live in a fantasy world of abundant water, but for most of the globe, water is a precious commodity. The massive droughts in China underscore the fact that we're simply running out of the freshwater needed to sustain the earth's nearly 7 billion people. And this problem is hardly new ...
When physicist and Big Think blogger Michio Kaku explains the concept of string theory, the result is downright poetic: “Physics are nothing but the laws of harmonies on a string. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on vibrating strings, and the mind of God…would be cosmic music ...
Nobel prize-winning economist Michael Spence, famous for his pioneering work on economic signaling, told Big Think recently that WikiLeaks is similar to terrorism—but not in the way you might think. "Some things are sufficiently important to be kept confidential," he says. "If it’s ...
Evidence is mounting that football is potentially even more damaging to the brain than it is to the body. According to an NFL-commissioned study, retired football players aged 50 and above are 5 times more likely to suffer from Alzheimer's or other dementia-related disorders. For players aged 30 ...
The conventional wisdom—or as James Watson puts it, “slogan”—in current cancer research is that different forms of cancer are genetically different, requiring a personalized therapy approach to each. Yet Watson, the Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA, believes such thinking may be due for a ...
Google caused quite a stir at Big Think’s Farsight 2011 conference by accusing Microsoft of copying their search results. Later in the debate, Microsoft's Dr. Harry Shum put Google on the defensive, arguing that Google ads incentivize spam. Shum then offered the closest thing to a truce ...
One of the many takeaways from last year's devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill was that companies need to have social media strategies in place to help mitigate unforeseen disasters. BP CEO Tony Hayward grossly underestimated the extent to which his company needed to maintain a two-way dialogue ...
As governments teeter throughout the Middle East, the political outcomes of the populist Arab revolts—Western style democracy, Islamist theocracy, or something in the middle—are largely out of the West's control. But international relations expert Parag Khanna suggests that a choice made ten years ...
Biotechnology got a moment in the spotlight last week when President Obama called out the now-famous Kathy Proctor in his State of the Union speech. Hailed as one of the faces of “today’s fast-changing economy,” Proctor could be seen on camera proudly pointing at herself: “That’s me!” The 55-year ...
Tempers ran high at Big Think's Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco this week when Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Microsoft's Bing of using Google data to improve its search results. The second session of the high-profile conference followed a bomb Google dropped early ...