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Is there a way to bring out the genius within all of us? The New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer asks neuroscientist Joy Hirsch about the nature of neuro-identity.

Think not in terms of the bottom line, but the skyline.

We surprise the world’s brightest minds with ideas they’re totally unprepared to discuss. This week on Big Think’s podcast, we’re joined by beloved actor/educator Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Great individuals will sometimes behave badly because they can.

In collaboration with Exponential Finance

The Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose life inspired the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind was killed today, along with his wife, in an automobile accident. 

Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains current research into creative “flow states,” examining what happens in the brain when rappers and jazz musicians improvise.

Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Deny Evolution If adults want to deny evolution, sure. That’s fine. Whatever. But those adults better not make their kids follow in […]

The tale of a young man driven to his death for fighting for what is right, and the young woman picking up where he left off.

No one should be plugged in 24/7, says Arianna Huffington. A commitment to mindfulness as a life strategy requires an easing away from our devices, especially before bedtime.

Why Banksy’s dystopian vision of the future might be the kind of shock we need to realize the problems humanity faces.

Arianna Huffington explains to Maria Konnikova how mindfulness seeks to recreate “the Garden of Eden, but with consciousness.”

Centuries-old mindfulness breathing and meditation practices have become an increasingly popular fad, but do they really have the power to transform lives? A growing body of scientific evidence says they do.

Arianna Huffington argues that mindfulness meditation is a necessary antidote to America’s unhealthy work culture.

Everyone’s favorite Science Guy chats with Vsauce3’s Jake Roper about the importance of science education in ensuring future generations remain creative, experimental, and evolutionarily competitive.

The genius of meetings at the office, and other forms of communal decision-making, is that everyone can bring their unique knowledge to bear on a specific problem.

The beautiful and intricate Czech capital is like an anti-Silicon Valley.

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

Your IQ wasn’t set at birth. Turns out, intelligence is quite malleable. Genes play a role in influencing your intelligence, but not as much as your upbringing.

The glorious meteor shower peaking this week is the most consistent, year after year. Here’s why. “Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, […]

The standard line against painter John Singer Sargent goes like this: a very good painter of incredible technique, but little substance who flattered the rich and famous with decadently beautiful portraiture — a Victorian Andrea del Sarto of sorts whose reach rarely exceeded his considerable artistic grasp. A new exhibition of Sargent’s work and the accompanying catalogues argue that he was much more than a painter of pretty faces. Instead, the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends and catalogues challenge us to see Sargent’s omnivorous mind, which swallowed up nascent modernist movements not just in painting, but also in literature, music, and theater. Sargent the omnivore’s dilemma thus lies in being too many things at once and tasking us to multitask with him.

Bill Nye: We May Discover Life on Europa Bill Nye (The Science Guy!) describes the possibility of discovering life on Europa, arguing that we might make such a discovery in […]

“Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.”

Psychologists recognize a thin line between creative genius and destructive psychopathy: general intelligence and so-called diversifying experiences that happen in childhood or young-adulthood.

What would you do? Imagine you’re a politically conservative, devoutly religious art dealer fleeing your war-torn country when you suddenly see art radically unlike anything you’ve seen before. Do you stay the course or gamble on this next “big thing”? Now add the sudden death of your pregnant young wife, which leaves you with five children under the age of nine whose futures now depend entirely on your choices. Do you roll the dice with your life and theirs? If you’re Paul Durand-Ruel and that artist is Claude Monet, the original Impressionist, you don’t just make that bet; you go “all in” — staking your family’s fortunes to those of a family of revolutionary artists. The exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, goes “all in” with Durand-Ruel’s gamble and pays off big with a stirring tale of personal courage and art history in the making.

Joseph Joubert was a French essayist whose collected works were not published until after his death in 1824.

While our culture praises innovation and invention, we owe our greatest successes—including those of the innovator and inventor—to imitation and outright copying.

Why did an academic at MIT recently make the absurd claim that half of all children will be autistic by 2025?

How genius travels, and where it settles  

Few American cultural institutions stared as deep into the yawning, austerity-driven abyss of large-scale deaccessioning as The Detroit Institute of Arts. When the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, vulturous creditors circled the DIA’s collection, estimated worth (depending on the estimator) of $400 million to over $800 million. Some experts see signs of a Detroit comeback, however, but one very visible sign is the new DIA exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, a showcase of the city’s ties to Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as a tribute to Kahlo’s and Rivera’s own artistic comebacks. Few exhibitions truly capture the spirit of a city at a critical moment in its history, but Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit is a show of comebacks that will have you coming back for more.