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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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 ...
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 ...
If you think about the modern employer-employee relationship, we as employees show up in an organization and we’re in a very vulnerable space. We have very little formal power. We’re showing up and we are at the whims of the boss. We’re the heroic leaders. If you’re showing up as a leader you’re ...
What's the Latest Development? Once considered a pioneer in digital publishing when he offered a short story solely in e-book format back in 2000, Stephen King has announced that his latest novel, Joyland, will be released solely as a physical book starting June 4. Although Amazon does have it ...
We photograph everything, everywhere we go. Then we share these photos everywhere. To Larry Lessig, this is a good thing. We have shifted from being a passive "read-only" culture to a "read-write" culture in which we actively participate in a work of art, or snap shots of food in restaurants ...
There’s an old joke about a government project to find the answer to that great mathematical conundrum, 2 + 2 = ? When the economist gets his turn to answer, he whispers in the ear of the bureaucrat overseeing the project, “What do you want it to equal?” Social scientists have an unsavory ...
What's the Latest Development? New figures released by the Leichtman Research Group show that for the first time ever, multi-channel video providers -- including cable, satellite, and telephone companies -- lost customers over a 12-month period, in this case the period from April 2012 to March ...
I think everybody knows the game Rock-Paper-Scissors. Paper covers rock. Rock breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. We all learned to play this and what you want to do is be unpredictable to your opponent. What’s the best strategy? Well, if you just don’t want to lose, your best strategy is to ...
What's the Latest Development? A Wisconsin engineer who wishes to be known only as "Joe" has successfully created a low-end version of the 3D printed Liberator handgun originally designed by Defense Distributed, which had released its schematics online earlier this month before the US State ...
Imagine, for a moment, that you recently discovered you are an opera lover. A friend dragged you to “Aida” last year and you were enraptured. The same friend took you to “Don Giovanni” and you melted as the first ominous notes of the overture filled the hall. You’d like to harness your new-found ...