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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What's the Big Idea? Whether you think Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent proposal to ban large sized sodas in New York City is government overreach, or not going far enough, this is incontrovertible: sugar is bad for you. Not only is it bad for you, it's as addictive as heroin. And yet, the ...
After enjoying ratings as high as 80 percent in the mid-1990s, the Supreme Court today has the support of only 44 percent of Americans according to a New York Times-CBS News poll released this morning. This figure is even lower than the 52 percent approval level reported in a Pew study last ...
I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any ...
What is the Big Idea? Human beings have biological clocks that are set to the path of the sun. But our modern lives disrupt this synchronization of internal and social clocks, causing permanent jet lag that might be the source of severe pathologies. Till Roenneberg, Interim Director of the ...
NASA released this video of the late Ray Bradbury reading a wonderful short poem entitled "If Only We Had Taller Been," which Bradbury wrote on the occasion of the historic Mariner 9 Mars Orbiter mission, on November 12, 1971. In the video, Bradbury confesses he is the "least scientific" member of ...
What's the Big Idea? What does it mean to be connected in the 21st century? Hope, interdependence, and possibly the creation of a new consciousness, says Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is the founder of the Webby awards and creator of a new documentary, Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death ...
If you're a space junkie like me, there was quite a lot to take in this week. And it was all pretty exciting. First there was the splashdown of SpaceX's Dragon capsule after its first successful delivery run to the International Space Station, a landmark mission for the commercial space industry ...
The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, characterized “cyber” as an “existential threat to the United States of America” in a recent issue of Fortune Magazine: The challenge for me and many other leaders is to really understand it….We are vulnerable in the ...
As Wisconsin voters stream to the polls today in the Gov. Scott Walker recall election, most commentators are warning that a Walker win would be a disaster for the left. The conventional wisdom has it that a vote to leave the embattled Republican governor in office would deal a huge blow to unions ...
What's the Big Idea? At 29, Edie Weiner was the youngest woman to ever be elected to a corporate board. "I really do respect the women who run for public office because it is so personally assaulting on them," she told Big Think in a recent interview. "How they don’t go home every night and want ...
Europe’s economic troubles are reaching a pivotal point. In Spain, where austerity measures has caused a 0.3% economic contraction from Q4 of 2011, unemployment has risen to a record 25% and just over 50% among youth. The Italian economy, already forecast to grow negatively this year, contracted 0 ...
"We don't really want what we think we want," says philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It's a strange, almost exotic thought at a time when many of us are inundated daily with the prospect of infinite choice. You can no longer buy a product, it seems, without expressing your opinion. (Do you want whiter ...
What's the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller's daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through critical strategic victories in the 100 Years' War, claiming to be guided by divine insight. In the very first hours of the ...
What's the Big Idea? At TEDxSummit 2012, Hans Rosling predicted that mankind’s population threshold will be 10 Billion people. His talk was entitled Religion and Babies, as his goal was to find the correlation between the two, which in fact, is non existent. He reasons that it is not religion ...
Charging a $100,000 membership fee for an online dating site could be a great way to profit off men who want to signal their wealth to potential mates. But the profits from the Secret Diamond Club will come from women who don’t realize that the “secret” part of the club is there is almost no chance ...