Search Results

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.

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.

Well, that was an eye-opener. 

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.

While theism continues to unite the vast majority of the world’s population, westerners of a certain age have never before accepted atheism with such enthusiasm.

Consciousness is what it’s like and how it feels to be you. Thus, consciousness exists in a realm of irreducible subjectivity with which science isn’t always comfortable.

The town council at the center of the recent Greece vs. Galloway Supreme Court ruling hosted its first atheist invocation this week. Dan Courtney’s speech quoted Immanuel Kant and warned of the government turning a deaf ear to its citizens.

Big Think is a knowledge forum that features insights from the world’s leading thinkers. Whether it’s Michio Kaku discussing energy sources of the future or Stephen Dubner, the co-author of […]

Two of America’s core values—democracy and meritocracy—seem increasingly conflicted and the way we talk about them isn’t helping: 1. “-ocracy” means “rule of.” Democracy is rule of the demos, the […]

Neil deGrasse Tyson recently joined the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and Lawrence Krauss when he called philosophy “distracting” and criticized it for not offering the kinds of tangible gains of science.

The Nantucket Project sees art + commerce as “the new convergence” that defines our world today.

Do you want to be more effective and attract desired outcomes? The ancient Chinese did, too. They devoted themselves to understanding wu wei—effortless action, or spontaneity. They saw it as […]

This map shows that your chances of rising above your birth class vary tremendously depending on where you live.

By hitting snooze you are making the wake-up process more difficult and drawn out. 

There has been a lot of attention in recent years on flow—complete absorption in a task that it almost seems effortless. The modern pursuit of flow—how to achieve it, how […]

Is there a way to see past the barrier the Universe puts up before it became transparent to light? Image credit: Mark Kamionkowski, of gravitational waves. “From earliest times, humans — explorers […]

What is Punk? Punk isn’t about mohawks or studded leather, says Henry Rollins – it’s about resistance to tyranny in any form. How Art Can Change Society, with Sarah Lewis Sarah […]

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is actually an ancient notion. Humans are wired to compare ourselves to others and, as a result, we suffer a sense of restlessness about our […]

“Wu wei is an early Chinese term that means literally no doing or no trying,” says Edward Slingerland, author of the new critically acclaimed book about the power of spontaneity, Trying Not […]

There are many ways to transmit big ideas – through videos, through the written word, or as the title of this blog attests, through pictures that are worth more than 1,000 words.

LOVERS of the Big Think will rejoice at hearing about the world’s largest migration of brain: BEIJING – Thousands of philosophers are expected to descend upon China’s capital in 2018 in […]

Did you watch “Cosmos” last night? The show was trending on Twitter during its broadcast, which is a good sign that television watchers crave shows that make them smarter. As […]