Dr. Helen Blair Simpson of Columbia University Medical Center continues our series "Big Thinkers on Mental Health" with an informative crash course on the intricacies of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Dr. Nichole Foubister gives a crash course on bipolar disorder and offers hope for the future of treating this difficult mental illness.

What's the best way to help someone with PTSD? Understand it.

Big Think and the Mental Health Channel are proud to launch Big Thinkers on Mental Health, a new series dedicated to open discussion of anxiety, depression, and the many other psychological disorders that affect millions worldwide.

Dr. Michael Lindsey of NYU's Silver School of Social Work shares his views on the state of mental health within the African-American community.

What distinguishes real OCD from how it's depicted in pop culture — a characteristic of someone's perfectionist tendencies — is that sufferers respond to stimuli in the same way everyone else does.

A new study says that the less sleep you get, the more likely you'll be to catch a cold. 

Anxiety is typically a helpful evolutionary tool, but it can sometimes become a pathology.

Just 10 years ago, the suicide-prevention community consisted mainly of families who had been affected by the suicide of a loved one. Today, it numbers in the hundreds of thousands. 

The hurdles in life presented by traumatic experiences, if treated properly, represent opportunities for momentous personal growth.

Those who want to keep Syrian refugees out of the country are succumbing to a classic error of logical reasoning. 

NYU's Dr. Nicole Foubister chats with us about the two-faced nature of bipolar disorder.

Mental illness is not one-size-fits-all. Just look at the state of mental health in the black community, which is replete with unique and systemic issues.

Why don't we just listen to our body? Because our minds, and our culture, are often louder.

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."

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: […]

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

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?

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

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.

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 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.

We don’t think or exist in empty space; we need nourishment from the earth, literally, to live and create.

Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. 

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 […]

One of my favorite BIG THINKERS, Dave Berreby, criticizes our Declaration of Independence.  Here’s the Declaration’s theory:  We have the right to life, and we have the right to the […]

1. The Bill Gates Condom The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will award a $100,000 grant to the person who invents a next-generation condom that “significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in […]

One thing that distinguishes us conservatives from libertarians is that we’re actually worried about growing inequality in America. We’re not that obsessed by the bare fact of economic inequality, but […]

We are taking Big Think as you know it today and opening our doors to go deeper and wider. We will continue to focus on big ideas, and then, help you put the ideas into practice.