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.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
“Desperate Haitians scrambled Sunday to find food and water and guarded their meager possessions against the advance of looters as the U.S. and other nations struggled to jump-start a sluggish relief effort. Even as Navy and Coast Guard ships arrived offshore, a round-the-clock airlift intensified ...
“Democrats and Republicans ramped up election eve get-out-the-vote efforts in their close battle for a Massachusetts Senate seat that could decide the fate of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and the rest of his agenda at the opening of the 2010 midterm campaign season. Obama needs ...
Having a derriere and thighs which are disproportionately large compared with your upper torso, otherwise known as being “pear shaped”, could have serious health benefits. “Oxford University scientists -- who have looked at all the evidence on the health effects of storing more fat on the hips ...
A British man has been arrested under the Terrorism Act and given an airport life ban after he used Twitter to vent his anger about disrupted travel plans caused by bad weather. “When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers's travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by ...
Troops and riot police has been despatched to the Nigerian city of Jos after fights between gangs of Muslim and Christian youths led to a reported 12 deaths. “Houses, mosques and churches were set alight and a dusk-to-dawn curfew is now in force. The city has a history of ethnic and religious ...
“Millionaire Sebastián Piñera won a landmark victory in Sunday's presidential election, and will become Chile's first conservative leader since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet two decades ago. With 99% of polling places reporting, Mr. Piñera had 51.6% of the vote, compared to 48.3 ...
“‘You can kill the dreamer, but you cannot kill the dream.’ More than four decades after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., that was the defiant message given Sunday by the man King spent his last hour alive with. Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal and state holiday ...
Amazon has expanded its Kindle self publishing platform, otherwise known as the Digital Text Platform, to allow authors worldwide to push out their content. “The scheme, which was only available in the US previously, will support English, German and French languages, but neither Mandarin or Spanish ...
It has taken nearly 22 years for Ali Hassan al-Majid to be judged by Iraqis for perpetrating one of the worst massacres in modern history, reports The Times. “Even peering out from the smudged window of an Iranian military helicopter, it was clear that a terrible crime had been committed against the ...
Gunfire and explosions ripped through Kabul early this morning after Taliban gunmen, some strapped with suicide bombs, launched a commando-style assault on government buildings. “It was the worst attack on the city in nearly a year. Gunfire and loud explosions could be heard across the capital and a ...
For those of us who didn’t live in the time that the moral giant Martin Luther King, Jr., walked the earth, we have only the pictures—the young, fiery preacher, the protest leader sitting in a Birmingham jail, the seas of people listening to the “I Have a Dream” speech, and, finally, the flock of ...
String theory has been one of the most famous ideas to emerge from physics in the past 50 years, yet a vocal minority of physicists have criticized its failure to provide testable experimental predictions. In an interview this week, Columbia University's Peter Woit untangles a fundamental model of ...
When you live in Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration is not just a one day affair. Here we have King Week activities, galas and marches for days. Morehouse College, Dr. King's alma mater, puts on several commemorative programs honoring the famed civil rights leader. On Auburn ...
Next week there will be photos from my trip to St. Louis, once I've had time to do the normal cropping and processing. Until then, there's this: I'm fascinated by the way the camera reveals unfamiliar-seeming details of familiar surfaces. Fallen timber, Hudson Highlands Nature Center ...
I came close to making it through the weekend without blogging, but the new statement from AQAP forced my hand. The statement denies that anyone was killed in the strike on Friday that was alleged to have killed Qasim al-Raymi. This Mareb Press article claims that yesterday numerous al-Qaeda ...