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.
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If you're a leader in a non-arts field you may believe that the arts are irrelevant to your business. The reality is that maybe you're right. Maybe in your core business it doesn't matter. But your customers care. You like your customers too, so what happens is that the arts are a way to ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US) details the challenges involved in what its authors call "climigration": the resettlement of communities that are losing their land due to the effects of ...
Can experimental findings look too good to be true? Last week I wrote a blog post about some experiments showing a counterintuitive finding regarding how the need to urinate affects decision making. It’s since been brought to my attention that these experiments (along with dozens of others) have ...
I’m willing to agree that information is a source of stress. I’m willing to agree that there's too much if it means that we have trouble finding what we’re looking for. But, yes, I think that is endemic to the human condition because we humans are information-seeking creatures. Information is ...
Those of you who have grown up on the Internet, when we look at you we see skills, competencies that we admire. We may want to learn them, but while you can try to teach them to us we will never be as competent as you are by the very nature of you're having grown up in this world, growing up with ...
National Geographic, some years ago: a melancholy piece about the emptying of the Dakotan prairie, illustrated with pictures of pension-age waitresses in doomed diners in dying towns, and of the wind playing with dolls in windowless farmhouses, abandoned long ago. Same location, same magazine ...
The universe is quantum. Physicists have known that for decades. Yet the economy remains as Newtonian today as when Sir Isaac Newton was the Master of the Royal Mint at the beginning of the 18th century. The time has come for a new and improved quantum economics: An economic system that is ...
Modernism first moved on May 29, 1913. That’s century-old hyperbole, of course, but if any date achieves day of infamy status for modern art in the 20th century, it’s the day that Russian composer Igor Stravinsky teamed up with Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes ...
While in Joshua Tree this weekend for another event, my friend and I swung by Shaktifest, the sister festival of the more popular Bhaktifest, which takes place every September. Both fetes are entirely devoted to the music of kirtan (mantra chanting) and bhakti (devotional) yoga. By midday Sunday ...
What explains the seemingly universal human fear of dying? It’s a mixture of two things, which could be separated. One is we know that other people die. And when other people die, particularly people who have a close role in our lives, we experience it as a potentially final loss. And from that ...
What's the Latest Development? "Ellie" is the name scientists at USC have given to a combination of hardware and software that together presents patients with a highly realistic virtual therapist. While her rendered image appears on the screen, three devices track and record the patient's words ...
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a tragic conflict in the sense that there is not a solution that deals with the aspiration of both people. I belong in the context of Israeli politics. I have a particular point of view I think, so I have always thought that the settlements are a disaster and ...
If you look at the history of science you can ask have there been people who were outsiders in the past who are now accepted today. That raises an issue about what it means to be an insider or an outsider. Until relatively recently - and it only dates back to the really the middle of the 19th ...
The Communication Age is here, and it’s time we harness it. Why? Because informing is a one-way conversation between you and your employees, customers, or other stakeholders. And let’s face it…you can send somebody a new policy, a new training manual, a new brochure, or even an email and not know ...
What's the Latest Development? With automation invading business sectors in ways that were once restricted to science fiction novels, experts are speculating on what the employment picture could look like for mere humans. For example, while driverless transportation in general would be safer and ...