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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What's the Big Idea? The gridlock in Washington last year that brought the nation to the brink of a credit default was only the latest symptom of a widespread – though not irreversible – cultural trend toward fragmentation and tribalism, and away from civil discourse. We've all noticed it ...
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Katie Hinde is the Director of the Comparative Lactation Laboratory at Harvard University. Her research examines mother's milk and how it contributes to infant development in humans and primates--including behavior, cognition and the brain. Here, she discusses the effects of breast milk on ...
If you were to guess the macroeconomic variable that had the widest impact on sexual behavior over the past fifty years, what would you choose? Personally, I would choose the one that increased the age of marriage, reduced teen pregnancy rates, gave women more control of their relationships, and ...
Since the industrial revolution, humanity has flocked to the cities, where jobs are plentiful and centralized services make inhabitants' lives easier. However, technology is gradually beginning to reverse this trend. People who have always dreamed of escaping the city for the country life, but who ...
Big Think's own founder and president Peter Hopkins gave Rahim Kanani at Forbes some face time in preparation for the 2012 Social Innovation Summit taking place next week at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. The two gabbed about everything from Big Think's achievements to ...
What's the Big Idea? In psychoanalysis, narcissism is regarded as a normal stage of childhood development. Freud saw narcissism as "a protection against falling ill." That is known as primary narcissism. Secondary narcissism, on the other hand, is seen as pathological. This condition is regarded ...
Why is megalomania, the close cousin of narcissism, so often found in people holding positions of power, including, say, your boss? Megalomaniacs seek power because they believe they have grandiose abilities, even omnipotence. They obtain power because they are skillful manipulators. And yet ...
In 1712, nobody would have looked at you funny if your business card read: "Surgeon, Apothecary, Investigator of the Unknown. Also, Shoemaker." There are many reasons why, in 2012, that's no longer the case. Among them, the increasing specialization driven by the rise of the great universities ...
What's the Big Idea? All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” - Albert Einstein In the latest RSA Animate production, Manuel Lima explores the power of network visualization in our increasingly complex world. A senior UX design lead at Microsoft, Lima explains how the ...
What is the Big Idea? Voters in Egypt went to the polls today for day two of the country's presidential election. Kate Woodsome from Voice of America, Asia curated Tweets, Twitpics and social media from the ground at this historic event. See below for images and multimedia. What's the ...
"It's time to say goodbye to Gordon Gekko behavior," Anthony Scaramucci told Big Think. "It's not good for society. Money has an intoxicating effect on people." Scaramucci is the founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital and author of the new book, The Little Book of Hedge Funds: What ...
What's the Big Idea? Is the Internet making us stupid? Will our capacity for contemplation be fried by the minute-to-minute updates of Facebook, Twitter, and instant messaging? Actually, no, says James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. The Internet has ...
What is the Big Idea? During his presidential campaign, François Hollande voiced his support for gay marriage and adoption for LGBT couples. He said he'd pursue the issue in 2013 if he won. Now that he has been inaugurated, he is being watched closely by both gay rights activists and ...
With state and local governments still suffering from a persistent deficit of tax revenues due to the moribund economic recovery, smart politicians are looking ahead and lobbying for spaceport development in their constituencies. Spaceport America in Southern New Mexico has been the most ...
In a word: no—at least no more than the “great divergence” that preceded it. Some calibration between developed and emerging economies was indeed inevitable, if only because the former couldn’t indefinitely sustain higher rates of growth than the latter. But if, by the rise of the rest, we’re ...