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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Cognitive Neuroscientist
The question of when we’ll be able to build a brain to act and think like us is so far off in the future in my opinion but it’s interesting to think about because it forces you to actually see what you have and to try to quantify it in a way that could be instantiated in an artifact. That’s a very ...
The job of the human being, as you go through life, is to become less stupid. And that is the job of science, to try to educate us about the nature of what we are, our very nature, how we’re built, how we work, understand that and in doing that it seems to me is fulfilling and of great value and ...
Are scientists different than you and me? I don’t think that’s particularly true. I think the difference is how they think about things. One thing that most scientists I know have at their core is when they hear an explanation for something and they don't think it works they do an experiment to ...
In the early part of my career I studied patients who had their two brains disconnected. So the left brain was disconnected from the right. There is a big nerve track that connects them in you and me and that was sectioned by neurosurgeons in order to prevent the spread of epilepsy. What we were ...