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.
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Life and relationships in the internet age
People go into education because they love students. They want to teach students, they want to help the world. And people who are in education want to reward each other and they want to feel good about themselves and about each other. So there’s a natural human aversion to the painful message ...
Your universe crashes. The world you had constructed in your mind falls like a tower collapsing into the dust of fallen dreams. Like thunder in the heart, everything seems like it's capitulated - nothing makes sense in your life any more. A crisis? When an unexpected stressful event happens ...
High school student Jeff Bliss offers to give his teacher a lesson in the video below. Bliss implores his teacher to create an exciting learning environment for his classmates. The teacher then tells Bliss he is wasting her time and he needs to leave the classroom. Watch the video below and let ...
Amid the hustle and bustle of city life in Milan, a vertical forest will arise. The facade of a two-tower apartment complex will be covered with hundreds of trees and thousands of other plants. The Bosco Verticale by Stefan Boeri Architects will have the same ecological impact as 10,000 square ...
What's the Latest Development? As one of many gaming companies attempting to get closer -- literally -- to their audience, Valve is currently testing biometric devices that will track the quality of a player's perspiration during a game. The tests involve measuring the pH level of the gamer's ...
We live in very interesting times and as a young person you are going into a very turbulent and fragile economy that is going to get better. It’s going to take a while. When you're going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency ...
"None of my videos have any common tie to them," says Brooke Candy, a rapper who has offered her picks of YouTube as part of an original MOCAtv series called "YouTube Curated By." "It's all pretty erratic, like myself," she says. Indeed, Candy's picks are quirky and eccentric and speak to both ...
What's the Latest Development? UNICEF's Sweden branch recently launched a new ad campaign that gets right to the point: Likes (on their Facebook page) are great, but they don't save lives. One poster caption says, "We have nothing against likes, but vaccine costs money." In a video ad, a young ...
I think my mother and father were both very strong rebels in their own way. My mother rebelled by becoming a mathematician at a time when proper women were not supposed to do that in the 1940s. And my father, he still rebels against everything. So, in a way, I was their surrogate rebel. So ...
A recent poll found that 29 percent of Americans think an armed rebellion might be necessary. And Americans are armed to the teeth. There are somewhere between 270 million to 300 million guns in the U.S., based on different estimates. That makes the U.S. the world leader in the category of guns ...
An "intuition pump" is the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett’s term for a thought-experiment. It usually involves a story that enables you metaphorically to think through a bigger problem. Dennett works through a number of these thought-experiments in his new book Intuition Pumps ...
We need to experiment more. We need more trial and error. I started thinking "Well so what are you doing Tim? Are you experimenting with your own life?" And I thought back to one of the times when I’d been happiest - when I was a college student. I think the reason so many people enjoy being ...
I would like to ask a fundamental question - how much do you truly love yourself? The reason this question is so important, perhaps the most important question you can ask, is without knowing the answer; you will live unconsciously from moment to moment, just going through the motions without ...
What's the Latest Development? A study recently published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum claims that, far from being the lazy way out of shopping, grocery home delivery has the potential to impact the environment in a positive way. University of Washington professor and ...
This week the New England Journal of Medicine published new results from the Oregon Health Study, which randomly selected people for extensions of Medicaid coverage. To anyone who has studied expansions of health coverage in other countries, the results will not have come as a surprise. They may ...