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.
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Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century” according to Newsweek. Last week, Shlain was honored with a Disruptive Innovation Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC. She stopped by our studio to talk about the participatory ...
Near the end of his 2001 book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? , Henry Kissinger quotes Otto von Bismarck’s observation about the limits of diplomacy: “The best a statesman can do is to listen to the footsteps of God, get a hold of the hem of His cloak, and walk with Him a few steps of the way ...
What will the world look like without a single superpower setting the rules? That's the question that Ian Bremmer, the political risk expert, tries to answer in his new book, "Every Nation for Itself". Bremmer's focus is as much on politics as economics, but I think he has some useful insights ...
What's the Big Idea? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson believes in the power of science -- so much so that he gets hate mail for it. From children. As director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Tyson made the controversial decision to remove references to ...
What is the Big Idea? It's not uncommon for a patient to have a conversation with their doctor before a major surgery. But what about talking to a doctor during a procedure? At Italy's Le Molinette Hospital, doctor-patient communication doesn’t just take place before an operation is performed ...
Our interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman aired live on our site on Monday, April 30th, 2012. In this recap, he discusses his latest book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and answers a few viewer questions. Eagleman has referred to the brain as the body's "mission control center ...
What’s the big idea? Anyone who doubts that the Internet has the potential to bring people together should take a closer look at Neighborgoods, a service that helps users share goods with people living nearby. At first blush, Neighborgoods sounds like it’s just a service for penny pinchers, but ...
What's the Big Idea? Around half of the world's population currently lives in urban settings, and it has been projected to increase to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. The challenge of taking care of all these future city inhabitants will be enormous. Will we see the proliferation of ...
What's the Big Idea? If more women were on corporate boards four years ago would we have seen the kind of catastrophic financial and economic meltdown that occurred in 2008? Would the presence of female corporate directors have mitigated the damage? Recent studies have suggested that it's ...
What is the Big Idea? China's growth is slowing. Its economy expanded at 8.1 percent during the first quarter, which is significantly slower than the previous quarters and a disappointment compared to the last decade of double digit growth. There are two main reasons for the cool down ...
Forget BRIC. It's all about RGM, which stands for Rapid Growth Markets. It's a new acronym that represents 25 key market areas that business leaders should be paying attention to. Ernst & Young compiled a report earlier this year that identified the "top 25 ‘rapid-growth markets’ or RGMs [that ...
What's the Big Idea? “Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years ago," writes philosopher Alva Noë in his book Out of Our Heads . It's a bold assertion in ...
A couple of weeks ago a Dollars and Sex commenter wrote that the “origin of marriage was to create a legal contract by which a man could acquire a female slave.” Interesting point. Is there an economic story that explains the origin of this most-debated-of-all-institutions? The first humans ...
Francis Tapon has traveled to 80 countries and spent the last three years traveling to 25 Eastern European countries. In 2013, he will begin a three-year trip to all 54 African nations. Today, April 28, is the official launch of his new book, The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us. ...
What's the Big Idea? We did not come out of the womb with a guidebook to our bodies, but that would be a handy thing to have if we are to truly create health, says Dr. Mark Hyman, who has put together a step-by-step guide for individuals to take control of their own health called The Blood Sugar ...