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.
With Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the 2012 election is shaping up to be a battle over whether and how the federal government should tackle the division of wealth in the United States, a gap that has been steadily rising since the 1970s. As the debate unfolds this fall ...
What's the Big Idea? One of the unfortunate early casualties of a data-driven world is anything that can’t easily be measured. The great promise of the recent push toward the collection and analysis of “big data” is scientific reproducibility. If we collect enormous data sets on how millions ...
Julian Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador but remains in limbo in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has been on trial for some time in the court of public opinion. The exact nature of many of his alleged crimes remains elusive. First there are the sex crimes charges. Assange has ...
What's the Big Idea? It started with furniture, Kip Tindell remembers. When the Dallas-based entrepreneur set out with his partners to launch a venture in 1978, the idea was to sell furniture. They soon realized that the world has enough Bob's Discounts to go around, and that as small business ...
What's the Big Idea? When it comes to making choices about benefits, keep it simple, says Bruce Finley, Senior Partner and the Director of Global Workplace Communication at Mercer -- and calculate, calculate, calculate. If we're willing to do the math and put the time in to making informed ...
What is the meaning of infinity? How can the Higgs boson be explained in a way that is clear and accessible? The answers to these questions and many others can be found in five videos that theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku says you cannot afford to miss. This list also includes Dr. Kaku's ...
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. Today, Dr. Kaku addresses the question of where should NASA ...
Quick: what percentage of wealth in the United States is held by the richest 20 percent of the population? And what percentage of the pie does the poorest 40 percent have? If your estimates match those of the average respondent in Dan Ariely and Mike Horton’s survey, you guessed that the top ...
What's the Big Idea? The so-called "fiscal cliff" refers to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on December 31, 2012, along with a series of spending cuts that will be triggered on that same date. It is called a cliff because the change will not be gradual, but steep and dramatic. Economists ...
What’s the Big Idea? The days of children turning to their parents to learn how to cook may be coming to an end. Nearly half of Americans believe that in the next 15 years, more people will learn to cook from instructional videos online rather than from their parents. That’s according to a ...
What's the Big Idea? In 1990, Kate O'Connor was the aide for the lieutenant governor of a small, largely inconsequential New England state. Fourteen years later, when Howard Dean became a clear front runner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, that job -- her first -- suddenly took ...
Through luck or sheer force of will, these seven former interns all managed to make it from paper-pushing, truck-loading, and (literally) shit-shovelling to the very top of their fields. Many went on to become divas themselves. But was their coffee any good?
According to Henry Rollins, education is the great leveler of the playing field, which is why the punk rocker says that elites are fearful of it. What would happen if our educational system did succeed in leveling the playing field? According to Rollins, for one thing, the prison population will ...
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 ...
In the climactic scene of Woody Allen's clever and self-consciously juvenile film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask , Allen's character is a sperm cell who is waiting for his big moment. Allen's character is not happy with his assigned fate. Nor does he get to decide ...