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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

Virginia Postrel: Obviously another area that everybody talks about these days is it has to do with religion. How do we . . . There was this notion among the intellectual elites in the west and . . . that religion would just die out over time. I . . . Because I came from a religious place where everybody’s religious, I sort of found that hard to imagine. There’s a huge religious impulse in human beings. Maybe it’s biologically wired in, and people if they don’t . . . it expresses itself in many, many, different ways. And so I think that if you study the diversity of religion, it sort of takes away from the notion of sort of one true faith. But I also think it takes away from the notion of, “Oh everyone is inevitably going to be secular.” Because if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have happened already someplace?

Recorded on: 7/4/07