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
"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 ...
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 ...