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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A long tradition of thinking tells us that due to man's animal nature we need to have order imposed from above, in the form of religion. Without religion, we could not live together, and that is why all human societies believe in the supernatural and have developed one religion or another. This ...
In Drunk Tank Pink I talk about the effect of symbols on various outcomes. And some of the symbols I talk about I call super symbols. And they’re super symbols because they have even greater meaning than maybe some other symbols do. And I think maybe the greatest super symbol in our culture and ...
If you want to stop smoking here’s the best advice that I could give you. The first thing I would say is, smoking is actually not physically addictive for very long after you stop smoking. So we know from studies that about 100 hours after your last cigarette, all of the nicotine is out of your ...
“I believe the children are our future.” Never has a more brazen tautology graced the opening line of a Top 40 song. But when Whitney Houston popularized these words in her 1986 hit, she gave voice to an orientation that seems to be in retreat today. For Douglas Rushkoff, author of a new ...
In terms of sustainability and what we eat and what its footprint is on the environment and the consequences of eating one thing versus another, obviously it makes a lot of sense to be eating insects. They’re incredibly plentiful. They’ve got a very short turnover rate. You could be eating ...
The issue of risk is absolutely central to being a creative person. Whether it’s being a write or an entrepreneur or an artist risk is something you have to think about a lot and deal with a lot. Trying to create a life that is fulfilling and meaningful and satisfying to you is much harder than ...
When you look at the United States at the moment and you think about our future one of the things that you might ask is what are we good at? We used to be good at creating jobs, but we’re not so good at creating jobs. We used to be good at building bridges or highways or infrastructure. We’re ...
Researchers believe this cave painting may turn out to be over 40,000 years old, old enough to outdate modern humans. That also means this artwork could have been created by Neanderthals, and that would represent compelling evidence that these cavemen had minds like our own, capable of abstract ...
Drones aren't just the instruments of a tyrannical government that wants to kill its own citizens. Drones have an artistic side too. Witness the video below, which is a collaboration between the dance company Pilobulus and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Watch ...
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, an ancient Chinese text on military strategy, has been popularized in recent years as a playbook for Wall Street traders and NFL coaches. The teacher John Hunter, on the other hand, uses Sun Tzu's treatise to help students understand the connectedness of the global ...
What's the Latest Development? Currently being tested at MIT's Media Lab is a system called Inside-Out that, true to its name, allows a person to visualize the emotional ups and down of a typical day. There are three main parts to the system: a biosensor embedded into a wristband, a smartphone ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at several different organizations are working on delivery systems that will enable customers to receive packages while they are on the move. One of these systems, TwedEx from Microsoft Research, sends its parcels via a chain of individuals whose ...
What's the Latest Development? For their latest annual field trip to Indonesia's Wakatobi Marine National Park, University of Essex professor David Smith decided to try something new: He and his class dove 18 meters (59 feet) under the surface of the ocean, and then he conducted his lecture on ...
David Foster Wallace's classic 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College was not well known until after his death. In the video below, this great piece of life advice is given visual accompaniment courtesy of The Glossary. Watch here: Watch the original speech here.
The main thing that’s going to happen with predictive analytics is that it’s just going to become more pervasive. It’s going to be more ingrained. It’s going to be used more and more. We’re already being predicted all the time. It’s influencing our experience – it’s hard to know how much. I ...