What’s the Big Idea? Some genius at marketing giant BBH decided to outfit 13 volunteer homeless people in Austin, Texas with 4G Wi-Fi transmitters, turning them into human Wi-Fi hotspots […]
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“Too much experience…may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.”
The reassuring point of Jonah Lehrer’s new book is that neuroscientific research into the human imagination will enable us to engineer environments that foster the creativity that is every human’s birthright, rather than extinguishing it.
While researching creativity for his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer spent some time at 3M, analyzing the company culture that earned it the title of third most innovative company in the world in a recent survey of executives.
In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, there’s a chapter titled “Maxwell and the Nerds” about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist who discovered the four equations that govern electricity and […]
William Shakespeare: Playwright, language innovator, father of product placement
What separates the greatest achievers from the rest of us?
Jad Abumrad won a 2011 MacArthur Genius grant for his work as creator/producer of WNYC’s Radiolab. The Macarthur foundation describes his work thus: As co-host and producer of the nationally […]
It’s easy to see why, for most of human history, a creative insight was thought of as a divine spirit that came from “some distant and unknowable source, for distant […]
Even people hailed as geniuses have plenty of mediocre and outright terrible ideas. What separates them from the rest is their ability to filter the good from the bad. How do they do it?
Following the news stories of Maurizio Seracini’s search for The Battle of Anghiari, a “lost” 1505 fresco by Leonardo da Vinci that Seracini believes is hidden behind Giorgio Vasari’s 1563 […]
This past week, Restaurant Magazine, a British F&B trade publication, unveiled its latest list of the world’s best restaurants. This annual ranking–properly known as the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best […]
Sherry Turkle is at it again in the NYT. When we expect more from technology, her story goes, we inevitably expect less from ourselves. In a high-tech world, we flee […]
Andrew Graham-Dixon, who has been called “the most gifted art critic of his generation,” revisits the scandalous, sensational life of Italian painter Caravaggio and finds in it a model for […]
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In the seething cesspool of Caravaggio’s Rome, violence was a form of advertisement; it let people know you were, so to speak, the wrong guy to f#@k with. Internationally renowned art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon revisits Caravaggio’s life as a kind of model for career success in tough times.
A Q&A With Christian Wiman, Translator of Stolen Air When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century […]
His experiments provoke thought, laughter, debate, bewilderment, even outrage. So we ask you, readers of Big Think: Jonathon Keats – Genius, or Crazy?
Celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom turns eighty-two this year and is still publishing and teaching. In his honor, I’ve compiled a list of six things he’s outlived. 1) The Western […]
In a dream-like scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the titular tyrant [1] gently plucks a large globe from its standalone frame, holds it longingly in his arms and […]
Archimedes in the bathtub, Newton and the apple, Einstein’s theory of special relativity — Eureka! moments are what happens when hours of work come together in a single creative flash. […]
What’s the Big Idea? The words “Renaissance man” get thrown around a lot these days, but Nathan Myrhvold’s career evokes the true spirit of the phrase. More polymath than genius, the […]
Bistra Milovansky chases inspiration for a living. The Bulgarian immigrant and self-described “holistic lawyer” can often be found doing business from a hammock in Costa Rica, working on her laptop […]
The past few years have been tough on economics and economists. In a searing indictment written one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Paul Krugman concluded that the central […]
In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
The mobile health revolution, which started and took off in overseas emerging markets, is rapidly making its way to the U.S. The past few months have brought a surge of […]
Today the Friends of Yemen met in Riyadh. One of the key issues, as it often is at these meetings, is that of foreign aid. Several days ago a group […]
A Meditation on the Indefinable Nature of the Divine God is Love. How many times have we heard the word “love” being used to define that which is ultimately indefinable? […]
Batman is wrong to be nonlethal in the case of the Joker. This shows we can, in some cases, morally kill someone against his will. I am something of a […]
Many people looking to bring new ideas to old age are still warm from the glow of LED and plasma displays at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las […]
The emergence of neuroscience has shown researchers what happens to our brains when we daydream. Neither good nor bad in itself, daydreaming seems to be our default setting.