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 new rules for living longer and healthier
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 ...
If I were to give you advice on what to tell your daughter, who say, is a 13-years-old adolescent, I would definitely present all kinds of options to her as really valid. I would present the heterosexual family as a model. I would also say should could live a full life as a single person with ...
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 ...
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 ...
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? Among many other culinary distinctions, Italy is known for its high-quality cured meats, which carry the unique signatures of the areas where they're created. However, many of them have been banned in the US for decades, often turning meat-loving tourists into ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper appearing in the online version of Cell this week describes the successful reprogramming of human skin cells into embryonic stem cells. Scientists from the Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center figured out that ...
What's the Latest Development? Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a synthetic material that, when used to coat a device such as a heart valve or breast implant, prevents the body from rejecting it. The hydrogel is comprised of water and a special polymer that deflects all ...
Modern culture is intrinsically polygamist. The culture of sexual choice is precisely nothing but polygamy, polygamy without marriage, if you will. We live in a culture of multiple sexual and romantic and marital partners. According to the biologist's view, if we are indeed inherently ...
(Caution – this piece is wonkish.) An interesting aspect of the Oregon Health Study, which I wrote about a little while ago, is that it uses the “intent to treat” format of a randomized controlled trial. In this kind of study, the control group and treatment group are still randomized. The ...
The reason that eating and everything that involves is taboo is that it’s something we have in common with animals. I think that human beings don’t like to be reminded that they, too, are just organisms – big sacks of guts that are chewing and swallowing and processing and excreting. I think ...
It sounds preposterous: antibiotics for back pain? What on earth could antibiotics possibly do for back pain? Then again, it sounded preposterous when Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren said, back in 1984, that peptic ulcers were the result of bacterial infection (and could therefore be ...
People are wired for lots of things. We’re wired for novelty. We’re wired for humor. We’re wired for new pieces of information that surprise us in some way or add value to our lives. We’re wired for fear. Sometimes something scares us or seems like a threat. We want to spread it on so other ...
We might think that what drives behavior is individual will. And in fact, 105 years ago, we thought that the reason people got communicable diseases was because they had some moral failing. And in fact, what we need to emphasize is that there is a combined responsibility. Individuals, if they ...
In her new book Gulp , the acclaimed science writer Mary Roach goes where few have gone before and few have ever desired to go: the human digestive system. Indeed, Roach marvels at the fact that this is her almost exclusive domain. And that's a good thing, because Roach is a gifted writer who is ...