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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Unlocking the secrets of your brain
There’s an old joke about a government project to find the answer to that great mathematical conundrum, 2 + 2 = ? When the economist gets his turn to answer, he whispers in the ear of the bureaucrat overseeing the project, “What do you want it to equal?” Social scientists have an unsavory ...
I think everybody knows the game Rock-Paper-Scissors. Paper covers rock. Rock breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. We all learned to play this and what you want to do is be unpredictable to your opponent. What’s the best strategy? Well, if you just don’t want to lose, your best strategy is to ...
Imagine, for a moment, that you recently discovered you are an opera lover. A friend dragged you to “Aida” last year and you were enraptured. The same friend took you to “Don Giovanni” and you melted as the first ominous notes of the overture filled the hall. You’d like to harness your new-found ...
The legacy of the Victorian era - the time defined by Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until her death in 1901 - is a mixed bag. It gave us Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, unprecedented advances in science and engineering, the musical theatre of Gilbert and Sullivan, the poetry of Robert ...
This article originally appeared in the Newton blog on RealClearScience. You can read the original here. The courtroom is hushed. A teenage boy has been slain, riddled with bullets during a drive-by shooting, and there, on the witness stand, is his crying mother. She's understandably weeping ...
When I talk about rationality I mean really two things. One is so-called epistemological rationality, which is caring about truth, caring about being right and following that processes called truth seeking process meaning that you just don’t—you are not curious and engaged in discussions, not just ...
The job of the human being, as you go through life, is to become less stupid. And that is the job of science, to try to educate us about the nature of what we are, our very nature, how we’re built, how we work, understand that and in doing that it seems to me is fulfilling and of great value and ...
Some people enjoy being angry and some people really hate it and that is a known difference. It is a know dimension of individual differences. For some people anger is a positive emotion. For others it’s negative. I happen to be an extreme case with for me anger goes into depression very quickly ...
One of the greatest obstacles to finding your life’s task quite honestly can be your parents. We all love our parents – at least most of us do. And they mean the best. But often they’re the ones that screw us up most in the sense that they want to consciously or unconsciously direct you in a path ...
You might find, as most of us do, that when you're arguing with someone you start to feel frustrated with them or combative with them or irritated by them and that can make it especially hard to rationally consider what they're saying. So one trick that I've found particularly useful is to ...
A long tradition of thinking tells us that due to man's animal nature we need to have order imposed from above, in the form of religion. Without religion, we could not live together, and that is why all human societies believe in the supernatural and have developed one religion or another. This ...
In Drunk Tank Pink I talk about the effect of symbols on various outcomes. And some of the symbols I talk about I call super symbols. And they’re super symbols because they have even greater meaning than maybe some other symbols do. And I think maybe the greatest super symbol in our culture and ...
Researchers believe this cave painting may turn out to be over 40,000 years old, old enough to outdate modern humans. That also means this artwork could have been created by Neanderthals, and that would represent compelling evidence that these cavemen had minds like our own, capable of abstract ...
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, an ancient Chinese text on military strategy, has been popularized in recent years as a playbook for Wall Street traders and NFL coaches. The teacher John Hunter, on the other hand, uses Sun Tzu's treatise to help students understand the connectedness of the global ...
If you look at the broad literature that has been done on religious and spiritual beliefs and practices and how they relate to human health the large majority of the studies point to a positive influence that when people are religious or spiritual they tend to have lower levels of stress, anxiety ...