What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

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

Question: What keeps you up at night?

Ed Koch: No. I don't -- there are a couple of nights that I am sleepless, but I think that's more medical than anything else. Certainly not because I'm worried; but I do get up at night. I keep a pad on my night table and my mind, like the minds of most people, functions 24 hours a day and your mind is working out solutions to problems that confront you in the course of the day and suddenly you are aware of the fact that a phrase you’ve been thinking of to add to one of your letters – I love writing letters, is perfect and you just thought of it and you know that you won't remember it when you wake up. So, you fight yourself awake, that's at least what I do because the body doesn't want to get up, it wants to sleep. And it beguiles you, and it says, "you'll remember it in the morning." And my response to it always is, "No, I won't." And I fight until I open my eyes. And then I write the phrase down, and then I go to sleep.