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
Is innovation best pursued through fear or through long-term thinking? NASA, the government entity responsible for so much U.S. innovation in the 20th century, was a response to fear. The Soviet Union demonstrated it was well ahead of the U.S. in the space race. That is why in today's lesson ...
Alcoholics Anonymous is a perfect example of the Golden Rule of Habit Change. AA was actually created essentially by a group of amateurs who were alcoholics themselves who had no scientific background, whatsoever. And since then, AA has not really changed in 70 years. It’s been sort of frozen in ...
Religion and science speak to two different spheres. Science speaks to understanding the universe in which we live and it doesn’t pass moral judgments in any way. Religion tells you how to structure your life, how to live a moral life, how to interact with members of your family, with other ...
The folks on Reddit don't have a lot of credibility these days, so we tread with caution in sharing this image, which may indeed be a fake. According to one Redditor, the picture, which is of a science quiz called "Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel," was administered at a private religious ...
In an excerpt from Gary Greenberg's book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, the author argues that psychiatry is out of touch with today's science. He writes: In the four revision of the [American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental ...
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
A pet peeve that I have in the context of happiness research is that it’s called happiness research. I think the word "happiness" doesn’t mean all that much because it confounds satisfaction with life with mood. But more importantly, I think the word conveys a frivolous idea of what the social ...
I’m from Cleveland. At the beginning of a downturn in 2008, there were two car dealerships on Mayfield Road. One was Toyota, one was Honda. Business started to deteriorate and one dealership decided to do furloughs. So the salesmen and staff just took that afternoon off a week, unpaid. But ...
Outsider science is the scientific parallel of what is often called folk art, or outsider art. It’s an interesting thing that folk art has now become very popular and there are whole magazines devoted to it and galleries and collectors, but in the early 20th century it was very controversial ...
It's a common belief about rationality that being rational means being emotionless, being stiff, unable to appreciate beauty in the world, unable to love or even just have fun on a summer day. In large part I blame Hollywood for this misconception because it is commonly how rationality is ...
Bruno Carcellos de Souza Coutinho didn't think it would be necessary to go to the hospital after he accidentally shot himself with a harpoon that went nearly all the way through his brain. That's right, not only was Coutinho alive, he was conscious, and extremely blasé. And extremely lucky. The ...
Why is it that mere ideas can activate the pleasure circuit when those ideas have nothing to do with evolutionary survival, or adaptive advantage at all? There are a couple of possible explanations. I think the most likely one is that there are a lot of things that are created accidentally in ...
I think that human beings are most limited in their tendency to pursue certainty and to think that answers are somehow absolute or even beneficial. The degree to which we can go about the process of living as humans in increasingly interesting ways, in increasingly productive ways, is one in which ...
What does it mean to think like Shakespeare? The poet and playwright was much more than just a clever wordsmith. Shakespeare has long been admired for his deeply sympathetic identification with all things human. The psychological portraits Shakespeare painted, with a masterful touch of ...
Research in general has found that optimism in part is genetic. I'm sure many of you know people that just seem to see the glass half full. They have the confidence that they think they can get through tough times. They're optimistic. So genetics is part of it, but genes are not destiny and in ...