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
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 ...
What's the Latest Development? Workers looking for a change of pace at lunchtime might want to take advantage of several new midday dance parties popping up at different places around New York and other major cities. Food takes a distant back seat to music at Lunch Break, a free event sponsored ...
What's the Latest Development? Students at London's Royal College of Art have created two devices, a mask and goggles, that when worn enable users to isolate and amplify sounds and sights respectively. The Eidos mask captures sound through a directional microphone and runs it through software ...
A study conducted by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention revealed that in 2011, 6.4 million children within the ages of 4-17 had been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives. More often than not, doctors prescribe psychotropic drugs, such as Ritalin or Adderall, to combat the ...
Darwin wrote a book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. I just did a third edition of that book, published by Oxford Press in the United States in which I inserted over a hundred commentaries by myself and other scientists about what Darwin had to say. Was ...
Neuroscience has found in recent decades just how elastic the human brain is. By flexing our brain muscles we can reprogram it in ways that are suited to higher levels of memory and productivity. On the other hand, common parasites might also be reprogramming our brains in surprising ways ...
When we are on a cutting edge issue as a society, when you think about reproducing and whether you are going to genetically modify your offspring, when you think about modifying yourself and whether it’s okay to take an attention-enhancing drug. You’re involved in the conversation about ethics. We ...
FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor called the growing trend of adding caffeine to snacks and energy drinks "very disturbing to us." What do you think? Should the FDA regulate caffeinated food?
Genetic modification has been very widely used now in agriculture for a long time. It’s fantastically effective and it will have a big impact on the ability of the world to feed itself or to make bio-fuels and so on. It has become controversial I think for many complicated reasons. Perhaps ...
I would encourage young people, if they want to have kids, if they want to have a family, if they want to go down that road, to understand that it’s like choosing a career. It’s a long term decision that you don’t make just because you had some great teacher in high school who taught you Spanish ...
What's the Latest Development? Last year, as a challenge to get more children to play outdoors, the UK-based conservation charity National Trust released a list titled "The 50 Things To Do Before You're 11¾," which included tasks ranging from "throw some snow" to "light a fire without matches ...
Spring. It's one of the nature's greatest shows, and a prime time for observing natural science. This spring has been a chilly one, and scientists, farmers and all sorts of outdoors enthusiasts are wondering if nature is out of sync, especially in the midwestern United States. "Spring has gone ...
Abstract Expressionism is now over half a century old, and in all those years nobody has bothered to improve upon the antiquated techniques of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. If you want to express your emotions, the expectation is that you spill or spread colorful pigments onto a swathe of canvas ...
We have a very strange sort of schizo-relationship with bacteria in our culture. On the one hand, there’s a tremendous amount of phobia, a tremendous number of bottles of Purell purchased, and the vast, vast majority of these bacteria that people are worried about are harmless in the case of ...
The study of the human microbiome is a fast emerging field of scientific endeavor, driven by the idea that we need to rethink our relationship to the 100 trillion microbes that reside in the human body. While we have been blasting these bacteria with antibiotics for many years, closer investigation ...