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 is the Big Idea? Flickr, a photo sharing application with a social media component, used to be one of the most popular tools for sharing photos on the Web. Its tagline read "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." And until three years ago ...
Most commentary on U.S.-China relations understandably focuses on the challenges that a rising China poses to America’s superpower position and the incentives that America has to prevent China from displacing it. But what about the challenges that a weak China poses to America and the possibility ...
I kind of want to move to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Actually, not really, but I may visit more often once the new 2nd Avenue Subway line is up and running in 2016. And that's because New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit has made the uncommonly wise decision to ...
I’m not aware of any polls tracking Americans’ attitudes toward scholars of political science, but if last week’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives is any sign, we’d better watch our backs. On Thursday, Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona proposed an amendment to a 2013 spending bill that ...
What's the big deal about J.P. Morgan's $2 billion trading loss? Austan Goolsbee, an economic advisor to President Obama, said the American public should be concerned because, in his words, it owned a life insurance policy on a guy who just got into a motorcycle accident without a helmet. But I ...
When I was five my family got its first microwave oven. The department store sent a nice lady over to teach my mother how she could use it to roast a chicken while we four children looked on in amazement. Little did I know then that this device was about to revolutionize marriage in an entirely ...
What’s the Big Idea? The average consumer associates 3M with tape – a product so integral to our daily lives that we barely notice it anymore. But in 1925, as an alternative to the unwieldy, glue-covered sheets of paper it made obsolete, the product was a stroke of genius. In fact, 3M is ...
Increasingly innovative computer scripts are being created that automate entire criminal processes—processes that, in the past, used to require human intervention. Don’t like your boss? Threaten to tell his wife about the affair with his secretary unless he pays you to keep quiet. The problem ...
What is the Big Idea? Social media has been inspiring change in the way business leaders interact with their customer base. And for good reasons. Companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50 percent increase in customer satisfaction, 48 percent increase in business leads, and 24 percent ...
What’s the Big Idea? “Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets,” said Andy Warhol. It seems America agrees: adult entertainment is an estimated $10 billion dollar industry in the U.S., though the ethics of capturing and manufacturing sexual desire on ...
Numerous studies have shown us how important sleep can be. Not only does it revitalize our bodies, it also gives the brain time to sort through all the information it has received throughout our hectic day. Sleep deprivation, and a lack of quality sleep, can lead to weight problems, high blood ...
There are approximately 105,000 people currently on the waiting list for solid organ transplant in the United States. 18 of those people die every day. These deaths are due entirely to the fact that there are far more people on the waiting list than there are available organs. Kidney transplant ...
Men have stronger sexual desires than do women…Women are the more monogamous gender…Homosexuality is an unnatural sexual behavior. Sexual beliefs, like these, are so widespread that we have collectively come to view them as being embedded in our biology. Cross-cultural data collected from pre ...
Over 200 powerful women gathered in New York City last week to discuss the idea of adding more women to corporate boards, an idea that seems to be gaining traction. Big Think had the opportunity to speak with Susan Stautberg, who co-founded the group WomenCorporateDirectors, an organization that ...
You heard it here first. NO NEW BUILDINGS. The future of architecture hangs in the balance–a balance of energy and environmental constraints that will profoundly alter the way humans interact with their environment. For centuries architects have seen themselves as creators of the built environment ...