By actively interrogating our own desires, we can mediate our basic wants (and fears) by compensating for our psychological blind spots with practical insight.
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At Big Think,we take pride in helping you develop the leadership skills you need to succeed. It’s why we created Big Think+, our unique online learning platform, which features exclusive […]
Losang Samten escaped Tibet in 1959, when he was only five years old. After growing up in India, he came to the United States in 1988, and shared the teachings […]
Is there a limit to how small a length can be? Image credit: Sabine Hossenfelder. Good ideas start with a question. Great ideas start with a question that comes back […]
No, this is not an illustrated guide to basket weaving. This is indeed a map. Or to be precise, a cartogram: statistical data presented in a geographic context. Even if […]
A start up in New York called Bionic Yarn makes an innovative new fabric out of recycled ocean plastic. With Pharrell Williams and G-Star RAW on board, Bionic Yarn wants to start a environmentally-responsible fashion revolution.
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.
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,” begins James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, opening a torrent of words that has drowned many readers in confusion […]
Nearly 250 years since its discovery, this dense, brilliant core was found to have our Milky Way’s first globular-based black hole! Image credit: Paulino Maldonado, via http://observatorioelojodeowi.blogspot.com/2011/05/subo-algunas-fotografias-de-espacio.html. “And then you […]
Stephan Vincent of Innovation Excellence explains how successful organizations are driven by leaders who inspire their employees with actionable missions and a drive for innovation.
Less than half of American workers ask for pay raises. As Kate Ashford of Forbes explains, the key is resisting the stigma associated with talking about money in the workplace.
This childhood photo of Kurt Cobain could be an album cover. It has the same spontaneity and sweetness of the naked swimming baby on Nirvana’s Nevermind. Source: History Pics
“…If you look at a lot of the innovations and breakthroughs today and you trace them back, as I did in my research, to their origin, a lot of times what you find at the root of it all is a great question; a beautiful question of someone asking why isn’t someone doing this or what if someone tried to do that? So I found that questions are often at the root of innovation.”
– Warren Berger
As we’ve reported here previously at Big Think, asking the right questions can be powerful. As leadership expert Daniel Pink explained in our video interview, managers and executives must know […]
New Zealand has granted residency to the first climate change refugees, a family from Tuvalu. Assuming current trends continue, rising sea levels could submerge island nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati in the next 30 to 50 years.
NEW YORK – The horrific Ebola epidemic in at least four West African countries (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria) demands not only an emergency response to halt the outbreak; […]
Straight from the department of “why didn’t I think of that?”, a British designer has invented an alarm clock that doubles as coffee machine.
The opportunity to get away from it all was even enshrined in the Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness as a place that “has outstanding opportunities for solitude.”
Interestingly, what we know about human psychology may make Watson as valuable an asset in the room as its ability to perform natural language analysis and complex mathematical calculations.
When levels of prosperity in a given country increase, women are more likely to benefit from improvements to education institutions. Any cognitive differences between men and women are not solely inherited.
Rather than fill our emotional needs when the world has temporarily exhausted us, might food be able to sustain us in a more substantial way such that we don’t only try to fill the voids in our life?
For many of us, zoos are a depressing experience featuring tiny, dirty cages, concrete floors, and sad animals. Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his team at BIG were commissioned by […]
My good friend and college professor Dr. M. Ritchey wrote a manifesto for a new project of mine. She has turned my insistence on bothering everyone about what objective qualities […]
Research has uncovered that creative answers are best found in 30-50 minutes of concentration. Conversely, 30-50 minutes of relaxation can provide that unexpected piece of insight.
The app is the TurboTax of the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, asking users application questions in a more familiar language than the legalese of official documents.
You’ve got to see what happens when this man realizes he’s talking to the living legend herself. Image credit: GayCalgary Magazine, via http://www.gaycalgary.com/Magazine.aspx?id=109&article=3182. “I’m just thankful that I’m still here. […]
What would it take for Americans to work a lot less? Our seemingly relentless drive to work may have been justified when society had far less capital and more rudimentary technology.
NASA expects a manned mission to Mars to take place in the 2030s but before that happens, researchers are hard at work to find a better meal plan for astronauts.
Perhaps our energies are better spent on trying to live better rather than trying to live longer.
When Dr. Kim Williams, the president-elect of the American College of Cardiology, recently wrote an essay encouraging doctors to recommend plant-based diets to their patients, shouts of praise and condemnation erupted form opposing camps.