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.
Technology companies can create enormous value, but what about jobs? Consider this analysis from Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, who spoke at a conference at Wharton in March 2013. According to a summary on Knowledge@Wharton, Brynjolfsson pointed out that ...
In a recent commencement address, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke offered ten suggestions to Princeton graduates ranging from “life is amazingly unpredictable...don’t be afraid to let the drama play out” to “call your mom and dad once in a while.” In between he offered some insights on the ...
What's the Latest Development? London-based junior doctors Kapil Sugand and Pedro Campos have created a system that displays 3D animated images of body parts on a large scale, giving medical students a whole new way to absorb information during a lecture. The system works through a type of ...
What's the Latest Development? Last weekend, as part of its Project Loon, Google launched 30 balloons, which together helped provide basic broadband-like Internet access to 50 or so testers in the Christchurch area of New Zealand. The balloons hover about 12 miles above the Earth -- well out of ...
What's the Latest Development? Pakistani parents living abroad who want their children to have the benefit of religious instruction -- ideally without any potential radical influences included -- have the option of paying a teacher via one of hundreds of online sites based in their home country ...
What's the Latest Development? Going live this week is what may be the world's first reality show that won't air on TV: @SummerBreak follows a group of Los Angeles-area teens as they enjoy their last summer before attending college in the fall. The eight-week series will consist entirely of a ...
What's the Latest Development? Amid calls in the European Union for more detailed online privacy laws, the Association of French Archivists is pushing back with a petition of their own claiming that allowing individuals to remove personal data from the Internet "could complicate the collection ...
There is a tendency for people to think science knows more than it knows. We hear phrases like "gaps in our knowledge" all the time, when in fact what we mainly have is knowledge in our gaps. The vastness of our scientific ignorance is especially evident when it comes to explaining how life ...
The anonymous author of the Big Think Neurobonkers blog has published a wee reply to my recent posts arguing that NSA leaker Edward Snowden should be prosecuted: To act on one’s conscience and leak information that is believed to be in the public interest is a noble choice. The ...
I’m writing this blog post from tens of thousands of feet above the midwestern United States, on an airline that I won’t name here. The flight got off to a rocky start, and before we left the airport I had lodged a complaint with the airline via Twitter and its website. Should I be rewarded ...
If the Russian multimillionaire and former online media mogul Dmitry Itskov has his way, we will be able to trade our bodies in for holograms and have computerized brains in 32 short years. At the Global Future 2045 conference in New York City, Itskov unveiled a timeline for achieving ...
The Taiwanese version of the Onion (sort of) has put out a new video mocking President Obama's hypocrisy regarding NSA surveillance. The US has long criticized China for being a surveillance state and locking up its own citizens for opposing government policies. But 2013 has revealed a ...
Children need exercise. Parents often worry that making time for athletics or even for just playing on the Jungle Jim is going to take away from their kids’ academic achievement. But actually, the opposite is true. There have been analyses of huge numbers of studies that all show that kids who ...
The binding problem is when you look at what's happening in the brain, you find there's a division of labor. You have some parts of your brain that care about vision, some about hearing, some about touch. And even within a system, like vision, you have parts that care about colors, parts that ...
The best way to address climate change is to stop pumping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That would eventually halt the progress of climate change and eventually the planet’s biosphere would suck that CO2 out. We have targets for that but right now we’re not doing so ...