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
What's the Big Idea? The famous "trolley problem" was a psychological experiment developed by Philippa Foot that involved a railway trolley headed toward five people who can't get out of the way. These people will die unless you, the subject of this experiment, decide to divert the trolley onto ...
If the race to map the human genome was the last great competition in science, the challenge to reverse-engineer the brain is the most amazing race today. But experts wildly disagree on how we'll get there. How long will it take for computers to exhibit human-level intelligence? If you are ...
The late Vice Admiral James Stockdale's finest hour did not come as Ross Perot's Vice Presidential candidate, which is how most Americans got to know him. Admiral Stockdale was the highest ranking naval officer to be held prisoner during the Vietnam War, and he made it through hell. In ...
What's the Big Idea? In his book, The Social Conquest of Earth the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson made the following provocative observation about the human condition in the 21st century: “We are living in a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and Godlike ...
In the most recent episode of Dexter , Showtime's series about a sympathetic serial killer, Michael C. Hall's eponymous character attempts to explain what makes him tick to his sister Debra, who has found him out. He turns to neuroscience: Dexter: An alarm is going off inside my lizard brain. ...
What's the Big Idea? Your brain is more flexible than we've ever thought before. It changes because it is constantly optimizing itself, reorganizing itself by transferring cognitive abilities from one lobe to the other, particularly as you age. After a stroke, for instance, your brain can ...
Any defence of normalcy by definition enforces an opposition to, or even the concept of, the ‘abnormal’. But who or what is abnormal? Women – in various ‘non-feminine’ roles were and are regarded as abnormal – whether indulging in the delights of other women, equal rights, independence, a ...
The human brain is fickle when it comes to commitments. Between 60 and 80 percent of people don’t use their gym memberships. Most diets work at first but backfire in the long run. According to a 2007 survey conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman, about 88 percent of New Year’s ...
Are you convinced that your moral and political views are the right ones? If you were to lay out all of your views and examine them, would they fit together in a coherent package? Are you open to new ideas that run contrary to your intuitions? In my last post I explored Bertrand Russell’s ...
Yesterday, nearly two thousand people “liked” this quote posted by Big Think on Facebook: Several subscribers appreciated the irony in Russell’s quip. Here are two: Below, I’ll return to the irony Thomas, Nancy and a few other Big Think Facebook perusers noticed — by the way ...
What's the Big Idea? As the K-12 school year starts up again in full force, it's worth asking: are American public schools really failing? According to the measure set by the country's most important piece of federal education legislation, the answer is yes. In 2011, nearly half of American ...
What's the Big Idea? Hey, did you know that sex improves your self-esteem? It's also linked to increased bladder control, reduced depression, fewer colds, pain-relief from the rush of oxytocin that precedes orgasm, better teeth (seminal plasma contains zinc; who knew?), and "a happier prostate ...
What's the Big Idea? The Internet has a terrible habit of misquoting Einstein on energy and creativity until he sounds like he’s the author of The Secret, not the theory of relativity. Here’s something he actually did say. Describing the effect of music on his inner life, he told a friend: “When ...
What's the Big Idea? A few milestones in the short but storied history of machine translation: in 1939, Bell Labs presented the first speech synethesizing device, the Voder, at the World's Fair in New York. In 1978, the first spoken words were transmitted across the Internet. June 2012 saw the ...
What's the Big Idea? Isaac Newton defined the optical spectrum, but it was Goethe who first understood that color is more than just a physical problem. In Theory of Colours (1840), the German writer and painter examined phenomena like colored shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration, as ...