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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Unlocking the secrets of your brain
Children need exercise. Parents often worry that making time for athletics or even for just playing on the Jungle Jim is going to take away from their kids’ academic achievement. But actually, the opposite is true. There have been analyses of huge numbers of studies that all show that kids who ...
The binding problem is when you look at what's happening in the brain, you find there's a division of labor. You have some parts of your brain that care about vision, some about hearing, some about touch. And even within a system, like vision, you have parts that care about colors, parts that ...
The history of understanding that there is an unconscious that’s riding under the radar of conscious awareness is such a new idea, historically. Several hundred years ago, people got pieces and parts of the idea, but it wasn't until Freud that he really nailed it. Neuroscience has drifted off ...
One of the most interesting things that’s happened in psychology in recent years has been the realization that the way we typically praise children in this country is not only ineffective, but in many cases it's actually counterproductive. And the basic idea is that there are two mindsets. You ...
Whenever a system becomes sufficiently complex, like a giant company, it needs a CEO, and that's essentially the role of consciousness in the brain. The brain is made up of many different subparts and systems that are always competing for control. So what I suggest in my book is that ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of University of Toronto scholars asked 100 students to read either one of several literary short stories or one of several nonfiction essays before completing a survey about their emotional need for certainty. Those who read the short stories received much ...
There are two forms of learning. There’s passive learning and active learning. And passive learning is what we generally do in university. We read a book and then maybe we write a paper or we take a test. We’re just simply sponges absorbing information that we kind of get out at the end ...
Jerry Seinfeld is not a fan of the check-at-the-end-of-the-meal-system. When you sit down to a meal, Seinfeld explains in the opening monologue of The Stock Tip , you’re hungry and money has no value to you. “You’re like the ruler of an empire,” ordering indiscriminately, “‘More drinks ...
It’s more important to have a useful perception of reality than an accurate perception of reality. But of course, in many cases, an accurate perception of reality is a useful perception of reality. And so it’s important to try to figure out what reality actually looks like and to try to cut ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at Stanford and Northwestern are working with the computer scientists at SRI International to create a method of password authentication that will be as intuitive as riding a bike. Specifically, users play a simple repetitive game that, over time and ...
Do certain types of religions foster different kinds of beliefs? It really depends a lot on the individual who is participating in that religion and what ideas in that context they hold onto. If we look at the Christian tradition or the Muslim tradition or the Jewish tradition there are lots of ...
What's the Latest Development? If the toys at the mall aren't doing it for your kid, consider this approach: Chile-based startup Thinker Thing is in the process of refining their Monster Dreamer, which is a headset that uses the wearer's brain waves as a blueprint for creating a unique Makerbot ...
This article originally appeared in the Newton blog on RealClearScience. You can read the original here. Can you run faster when you chase someone? The intuitive answer, of course, is yes. But, if you carefully timed yourself under controlled conditions, would it hold true? A study conducted by ...
I think people are unbelievably unrealistic about their expectations. I think they completely under-estimate what they're capable of. That's where they're being unrealistic. Tony Robbins says, "most people over-estimate what they can do in a year and under estimate what they can do in a ...
"Each language is in many ways an expression of how one society or culture thinks," says hyper-polyglot Tim Doner. "I feel that when I start to speak foreign languages, a lot of times I become a bit of a different person. Perhaps I say things that I wouldn't necessarily say in English." Doner ...