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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Big Think Intern
We are pleased but saddened to introduce our third book of the month: Mortality by Christopher Hitchens. The posthumous book represents the last work of the great journalist, polemicist, and thinker. The work, which draws largely on Hitch's award winning column in Vanity Fair, was unfinished when ...
What's The Big Idea? Scientists have given animals consciousness. Not through complex manipulation of the brain or through genetic manipulation, but by publicly acknowledging the consensus, for the first time in such a straightforward way, that non-human animals, including some of our ...
What's The Latest Development? The biggest development is not a development at all. Bill Nye, aka, "The Science Guy" is not dead, as was widely reported this weekend on Twitter. In fact, a Big Think video titled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children" has made news by having, as of this ...
Why I Support Guns I submit that there is a rational, human, apolitical argument for supporting gun ownership in America. No prominent supporter of gun use and ownership, nor the NRA, has ever publicly advanced this reasoning (to my knowledge). This argument supports gun ownership as a right ...
The White house is proposing a $1 Billion federal program to create a Teachers Corps, which would provide a $20,000 a year stipend for the best 50 teachers in their fields, so long as their fields are science, technology, engineering and math. The program would, if passed, eventually include 10,000 ...