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: How do brains develop?

Sam Wang: One thing that’s interesting about child development is that so much of it… There’re so many changes that take place in children’s brains, not only from birth to the age of 6, ‘cause this when people think of brain change, but also even through childhood into adolescence. So one thing that probably does not help is passive experiences for the child.

In the classic example, this is the Mozart myth. The idea that playing Mozart or the classical music to a baby will make the child smarter. What seems to be important is active engagement. So, for instance, learning to play a musical instrument is associated with improved spatial reasoning. And that seems to be something that really helps a lot. Another thing that helps is talking to children. It’s been shown that there’s a positive relationship between the number of words the child hears per day and IQ scores.

And this is true even when you crook for social economic status. And so, just simply speaking to a child, playing with her, talking with her, that kind of cognitive stimulation seems to have a lasting positive effect on the child’s development. And that’s something that I think any parent can and should do.