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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.

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Transcript

Topic: Dana Gioia reads Unsaid

Dana Gioia: Sometimes poems end up being things you don’t initially intend. I was asked to write a poem about New Year’s Day by NPR years ago. And I wrote a 36-line poem. It was quite elegant. And I began to . . . After it was broadcast, I began to revise it and revise it and revise it. And it finally ended up being a six-line poem that had nothing to do with New Year’s. Instead it had to do with how much of the lives we lead are invisible to anyone else. The poem is called “Unsaid.” “So much of what we live goes on inside. The diaries of grief. The tongue-tied aches of unacknowledged love are no less real for having passed unsaid. What we conceal is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write __________.”

Recorded On: 7/6/07