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
"My guess is that the Y chromosome of every living man has spent at least one generation in the testis of a warlord," the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes once told The New York Times . One sexually prolific warlord in particular was Genghis Khan, whose Y chromosome is now found in 16 million men in ...
What's the Big Idea? Long-time political activist and self-proclaimed "party crasher" Richard Tafel believes that American democracy is under threat. The environmental, economic, healthcare, and political systems we've relied on for decades are breaking down, he says. But unlike most ...
What is the Big Idea? It's not uncommon for a patient to have a conversation with their doctor before a major surgery. But what about talking to a doctor during a procedure? At Italy's Le Molinette Hospital, doctor-patient communication doesn’t just take place before an operation is performed ...
A couple of weeks ago a Dollars and Sex commenter wrote that the “origin of marriage was to create a legal contract by which a man could acquire a female slave.” Interesting point. Is there an economic story that explains the origin of this most-debated-of-all-institutions? The first humans ...
What's the Big Idea? We did not come out of the womb with a guidebook to our bodies, but that would be a handy thing to have if we are to truly create health, says Dr. Mark Hyman, who has put together a step-by-step guide for individuals to take control of their own health called The Blood Sugar ...
Bryan Sykes is the author of DNA USA, which documents his journey across America, Easy Rider style, as he describes it, to record a genetic portrait of the nation. What did he discover about the most genetically diverse country in the world, and what do these revelations mean? Watch the video ...
What's the Big Idea? "We’ve basically led people to believe that their health has to be in the hands of the health care system, that they don't have the power to control their health, to regulate their health, to create health," says Dr. Mark Hyman, the author of a new book called The Blood ...
As we approach Earth Day, I’ve had some interesting thoughts about the science vs. religion, materialism vs. spirituality debate. Being a spiritual teacher myself, I generally tend to feel more aligned with mystical and religious sensibilities, because they assert that the spiritual dimension of ...
Remember when people used to believe that it took a village to raise a child? It seems that the last vestige of that sentiment took its dying breath in recent weeks as online discussion boards launched into lactation consultants. In a time in which big corporations are a new mother’s best friend ...
Is there any reason to avoid death? We all die eventually, but is it a destiny sealed in for a predetermined time, or do we actually have some control over how long we are on this Earth? Most of us like to believe we have some control over our fates. This is evident in all avenues of our ...
In his new book, The Power of Habit, New York Times investigative reporter Charles Duhigg has drawn together the most cutting edge research on why habits exist and how they can be changed. In his interview with Big Think we asked him how he is able to apply the science to his own life. As ...
I know at least some of you are thinking: I already feel like I am having sex with a robot. But new research predicts that we will be having sex with actual robots within five years and considers an exciting application of robotic technology – replacing sex workers with androids. The ...
Gloria Feldt, author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change the Way We Think About Power, is comfortable with controversy. As president and CEO of Planned Parenthood from 1996-2005, she went up against an Arizona ballot initiative that would have outlawed all abortion in the state. Gloria ...
A new breed of legislation is sweeping the nation. 20 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, have legislation in place that employ ultrasounds as part of the abortion process. In ten of these states, the ultrasound is required, and in one of them, women must view the image and endure a ...
"Lesbian break-ups can apparently be bitchier than gay men's.” wrote columnist Giles Hattersley in the Sunday Times this weekend as he speculated his way through a piece on why 62% of civil union dissolutions (i.e. divorces) in the UK are between women despite the fact that lesbian relationships ...