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
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 ...
Folk physics is what everybody knows without taking any classes in physics. It’s towels absorb water. That if you throw a brick towards a plate of glass, it’s probably going to break the glass. You can’t push a rope. It’s what we learn about the everyday things in the world and how they react ...
Last month President Obama launched the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative to enable scientists to create a dynamic picture of brain function. As Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, writes on BRAINfeedback.nih.gov ...
I know some scientists, like Stephen Hawking, are trying to generate this impression that philosophy is dying. They even use a very interesting term, experimental metaphysics. They claim that today with the latest thing that quantum physics can do, we can put to an empirical test questions which ...
Very often the first piece of information we have about a person is their name. It’s often the first thing you learn about someone and we form judgments about people very rapidly. And those judgments accumulate, so the first piece of information is especially important. It can lean you in a ...
When we teach people how to catch liars, it takes us 32 hours. And there are over 30 different things you look for. I’ll tell you a couple of them in a minute, but if you’re going to remember them and use them and spot them you need a lot of practice. I could tell you exactly how to play ...