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Human intelligence is richer than logic: It includes “being funny, being sexy, expressing a loving sentiment — maybe in a poem or in a musical piece.”

How do you win a cyberwar against an Internet-savvy enemy like ISIS? One prominent researcher has suggested a troll-based battle strategy. That’s right: internet trolls. Could World War III be fought with memes?

Singularity University’s Peter Diamandis discusses one way in which virtual reality — a burgeoning exponential technology — will disrupt unexpected sectors of culture and society.

Before Oprah or Martha Stewart, Berg built an empire around her name.

Mark Rothko’s suicide colored how we’ve seen his art ever since. His son’s book paints a brighter, richer picture.

Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one’s ego. Ray Kurzweil: […]

Will nanobots someday deposit Shakespeare directly into our brains? In this week’s episode of Big Think’s Think Again podcast, we’re joined Buddhist-influenced psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein

The death of any given person is just a lack of connectedness to future experiences. 

Optimism, like imagination, is childish in the best sense of the word.

Yale Professor Jeffrey Brenzel argues that reading the great classics can not only enrich your education, but also actually make your life better.

The most important thing about art is every person’s capacity to make it, and that the body/mind discipline of cultivating your artistic abilities has collateral utility for every aspect of life.

What will historians say about our time 250 years from now? Lawrence Summers asks this question in a thought-provoking lecture about the evolution of ideas.

Professor Michio Kaku delivers a glimpse of where science will take us in the next hundred years, as warp drives, teleportation, and time travel converge with our scientific understanding.

We’re thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think. Here’s number two on our list, featuring Harvard linguist Steven Pinker.

We all want to be financially stable and enjoy a well-funded retirement, but we don’t want to squander our hard-earned money on poor investments.

Our successes and failures are similarly linked to others, though we may feel their effects only personally. Every choice you make, every behavior you exhibit, and even every desire you have finds its roots in the social universe.  

We’re thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think: It’s some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web.

From a personal tutoring service for his young cousin, Salman Khan’s company Khan Academy has grown exponentially into a massive, global, online engine for learning.

Chris Anderson, curator of TED Talks, explains how the plummeting price of bandwidth about a decade ago opened opportunities for new innovation to grow.

The CEO of Crowdfunder discusses disruption of the early stage finance process by way of exponential technology while also explaining the benefits of helping young entrepreneurs compete at scale.

Well, that was an eye-opener. 

The hope that humans can use wisdom and technology to prevent a bleak future for life on Earth is overly optimistic. It falsely presumes that we can use wisdom to overcome instincts.

The so-called creative class has made it more difficult for the creators of culture—artists and thinkers who depend on leisure time—to produce work that reminds the country of its values, purpose, and potential.

Too many top minds have “positive capability” bias. That label usefully contrasts with Keats’ “negative capability,” a poetic idea that applies to many unpoetic experts. It explains why Shakespeare’s psychology is better than much of the modern “scientific” sort. 

Without a nuanced understanding of what it means to be authentic, we easily shirk the effort required to fully explore our range of personal and professional potential.

Presidents should act more like Kings and Queens if our democracies are to avoid becoming mediocre, argues British Lord Robert Skidelsky.

Because intelligence is such a strong genetic trait, rapidly advancing genetics research could result in the ability to create a class of super-intelligent humans one-thousand times higher in IQ than today’s most brilliant thinkers.

Public opinion surveys are often cited as evidence of how people feel. What they really demonstrate is how human cognition is more a matter of emotion than reason.

Irony lurks in the surge of interest in cognitive psychologists’ research on human reasoning: we seem to be desperately interested in reading about how poorly we think.

It’s hard to imagine empathy being anything but beneficial. It has become one of the most championed mental states in the neuroscience age: the ability to feel what someone else is feeling and, if all goes well, extend a hand altruistically or compassionately.