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.
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Unlocking the secrets of your brain
So we have no idea what happens after we die, and I’ve taken that lack of our knowledge as an opportunity to write fiction about it. I have a book called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives , and the idea is to shine a flashlight around the 'possibly' space to illustrate how interesting is the ...
All of human behavior is incredibly complex and it’s influenced by heredity and culture, but the evolutionary argument is particular potent because, first of all, it reminds people that we’re animals. And this has implications for people’s conceptions of free will because the more deterministic ...
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...
What's the Big Idea? The images in art, writes the neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, "like all images, represent not so much reality as the viewer's perceptions, imaginations, expectations, and knowledge of other images--images recalled from memory." In this sense, the creative process of the ...
In the human brain, 100 billion neurons are connected by 100 trillion synapses. And, really, this staggeringly complex structure is only the beginning. (Consider that there may be roughly one hundred thousand trillion electrical signals traversing the brain in one second.) Can we build a working ...
A funny thing happened one day at an ancient Greek bath. The mathematician Archimedes realized he could measure an object's density by comparing its weight to the volume of water it displaced. So what did he do? He ran home naked screaming "Eureka!" or "I have found it!" Ever since this event ...
Last week, I looked into evidence that Americans badly misperceive the magnitude of the wealth gap in their country: the actual distribution in the United States is much more inegalitarian than we think it is. Several readers and students have asked me why I think this is the case. How could we be ...
1. Every Big Idea Was First A Crazy Idea Fred Guterl, executive editor of Scientific American, does a nice job of highlighting some of the crazy ideas presented at this year's TED conference, such as this one from Google's Google’s Vint Cerf: New technologies that make it possible for ...
"We celebrities are desperate pigs" confesses Penn Jillette in his recent book Every Day is an Atheist Holiday . Jillette is referring specifically to his participation on The Celebrity Apprentice, a show that involves showbiz folks who are so desperate to stay famous that they agree to "suck up to ...
A few years ago, at mile 20 of my second marathon, I promised myself I would never again run a 26.2 mile race. I had trained impeccably, ran my first mile a little slower than goal pace, as everyone advises, and was primed to shave seven minutes off my previous time and traverse the five boroughs ...
Vulcans, the extraterrestrial species in Star Trek, are capable of transferring knowledge to other species, including humans, through physical contact. Fortunately for humans, the Vulcans have a great deal to offer, such as how to eliminate poverty and disease. While this so-called "mind meld ...
Is it just us, or does it seem like everyone is turning into a conspiracy theorist these days? Aliens, spirit guides, the Illuminati – name some mysterious pocket of paranoia or eccentric belief, and there is some kind of massive online community dedicated to understanding it. While conducting ...
What's the Big Idea? Second only in vulnerability to the newborn baby is the new parent. This pathetic creature, no matter how many higher degrees it may possess, is a target for every silver-tongued huckster with a more cuddly (or less cuddly, but suffocation-risk-free) crib mattress or ...
Since the standards-based model of education overtook American public schools a generation ago, the answer to this question has been simple: prepare students for college and get them ready to be productive participants in the workforce. The new Common Core Standards Initiative — already adopted by ...
What's the Big Idea? In his new book, How To Create a Mind , Ray Kurzweil looks at the “pattern recognition” theory of the human mind, arguing that all higher-order thinking is based on a consistent pattern-recognition algorithm. "The neocortex is a metaphor machine," Kurzweil tells Big Think ...