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 Latest Development? Currently being tested at MIT's Media Lab is a system called Inside-Out that, true to its name, allows a person to visualize the emotional ups and down of a typical day. There are three main parts to the system: a biosensor embedded into a wristband, a smartphone ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at several different organizations are working on delivery systems that will enable customers to receive packages while they are on the move. One of these systems, TwedEx from Microsoft Research, sends its parcels via a chain of individuals whose ...
What's the Latest Development? For their latest annual field trip to Indonesia's Wakatobi Marine National Park, University of Essex professor David Smith decided to try something new: He and his class dove 18 meters (59 feet) under the surface of the ocean, and then he conducted his lecture on ...
What's the Latest Development? Among many other culinary distinctions, Italy is known for its high-quality cured meats, which carry the unique signatures of the areas where they're created. However, many of them have been banned in the US for decades, often turning meat-loving tourists into ...
What's the Latest Development? This week iRobot, the maker of the military PackBot robot, announced that it had secured multimillion-dollar contracts with the organizers of next year's World Cup, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro and 12 nearby host cities in Brazil. Alongside thousands of ...