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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The whole history of physics has been a history of diminishing the nature of time and diminishing the role of time. Take a very simple example. When you see something move through the air – that’s something that happens in time. And then you could take a film that you made of that and call that ...
The history of understanding that there is an unconscious that’s riding under the radar of conscious awareness is such a new idea, historically. Several hundred years ago, people got pieces and parts of the idea, but it wasn't until Freud that he really nailed it. Neuroscience has drifted off ...
A lot of people don't want to know, but I'd like to know if I have a 10 percent or a 90 percent chance of developing Alzheimer's some day. If I know I’m likely to develop it, I’m certainly going to start looking around right now to find if there is something that I can do to offset it. So ...
I think for many years I tried to bring participation into my work. I wanted my works come to life. I really wanted my artwork to breathe and live. And I tried several things including painting on the bodies of dancers. I painted the leotards of flamenco dancers and I had them dance in front of ...
No, Shaun White was not snowboarding on Mars. These tracks, captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are thought to have been created from sliding dry ice on the Red Planet's Russell Crater. Click here for a zoomable image. In the video below, Serina Diniega, a planetary scientist at ...
In pre-modern marriage, people are looking to choose in a class of people that is fairly similar to theirs. They also look in a spatial geographical area that is relatively close to their own. So we’re talking about a mode of selection that’s fairly horizontal. And because it is economic they ...
We all need passion. For me, the passion is about trying to help people to help themselves. But you have to marry that passion with rational, logical, deductive reasoning. Why? You have to marry the heart and the head. You have to be able to step back and frankly have the discipline to say, “If ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of developers at the MIT Media Lab has created a software system, My Automated Conversation Coach (MACH), that people can use in the privacy of their homes to practice their conversational skills. The system uses the computer's webcam to note facial ...
What's the Latest Development? When it comes to cyberattacks that shut down business servers and steal valuable data, some companies want to take "an eye for an eye" approach, launching counterattacks that could involve malware or covert shutdowns of hackers' computers. Such activity is illegal ...
One of the most interesting things that’s happened in psychology in recent years has been the realization that the way we typically praise children in this country is not only ineffective, but in many cases it's actually counterproductive. And the basic idea is that there are two mindsets. You ...
What's the Latest Development? With unemployment rates among young Europeans remaining high, and amid fears of potential civil conflict, some governments are reconsidering using part of their budgets to fund early retirement programs for older workers. It's one of the ideas that may come up at a ...
What's the Latest Development? A recent spate of kidnappings led a group of friends in Venezuela's capital city of Caracas to form a running group. Through Twitter and other social media, word spread, and now as many as 300 Runners Venezuela members can be seen jogging together three nights a ...
Whenever a system becomes sufficiently complex, like a giant company, it needs a CEO, and that's essentially the role of consciousness in the brain. The brain is made up of many different subparts and systems that are always competing for control. So what I suggest in my book is that ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of University of Toronto scholars asked 100 students to read either one of several literary short stories or one of several nonfiction essays before completing a survey about their emotional need for certainty. Those who read the short stories received much ...
There’s quite a bit of a debate in the field about whether everybody really wants to become a designer. On the one hand you can say this is a democratization of design tools. This is absolutely true and that is a wonderful thing. That means people who otherwise could not have had access to ...