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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Life and relationships in the internet age
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 ...
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook made waves with his pronouncement that Twitter employees have at least a decade of job security while the venerable Grey Lady "is not guaranteed a future in the digital age." Thiel did not make a judgment call as to whether ...
In yesterday's lesson, astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson advised parents to buy their children binoculars, and then get out of the way, if they want to instill a sense of curiosity. But it normally doesn't happen that way. Curiosity means spilling things, breaking things. In some cases, it ...
Robel Phillipos, of Cambridge, Massachusetts., has been charged with making false statements in a terrorism investigation, related to the bombing at the Boston Marathon on Patriot's Day. Phillipos is a friend of suspected bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. There has been a lot of speculation in the ...
May 1, or May Day, or the Feast of St Joseph the Worker, the patron saint of workers, is a day that workers were traditionally given off following the planting of the fields that later became a bank holiday and is today an annual occasion for displays of social unrest throughout much of Europe ...
After enduring years of misery, Jason Collins is now the first openly gay athlete in a major American professional sport. And yet, Collins is not technically the first. John Amaechi was closeted during his professional career, but he came out after he retired in February, 2007. Amaechi told ...
What I feel is that I need to give people something that they can grasp onto, that they can understand or comprehend. I think it can be very intimidating for people to go into galleries and see things that they just don’t have any idea of what it is that they’re seeing. That doesn’t touch them and ...
Your information diet is an ethical choice of yours, so when you’re on the Huffington Post looking at say the Kardashians and you click on the Kardashians, understand that you are not only reading that article, but you’re also voting for that article. You’re telling an editor to produce more ...
Creating clarity with a large, diverse team is one of the huge challenges that any leader is faced with. And what I was coached and how I was advised and what I finally fully accepted is if you want to communicate with the team you first have to connect with them. They have to want to hear from ...
I would say that the sexual revolution means much less than we think if it is not strongly accompanied by a full economic revolution. If you have sexual liberation on the one hand but on the other hand you make women responsible for having children, for wanting them, and you make women’s access to ...
There's a lot of pressure these days to be on, and there are some real, legitimate external factors for people, whether it’s the client might call or the customer might need something or you’re a manager and you manage across time zones. Those are legitimate reasons why you might be on and ...
So, you’re not good with numbers. Well, welcome to the crowd. There are many, many, many people who are not. And even the ones who are good with numbers, aren’t good about budgeting, because that takes not just the skill with numbers, that takes a certain amount of self-control. Fortunately ...