It is in our nature to need rules. By improving social productivity rules beats no rules, and evolution endowed us with rule-following traits accordingly. Comparing languages and tools can help us see our biological rule dependence. As can noticing that we are apt to ape more than apes.

Google and Fidelity, an international investment firm, will invest $1 billion in Space X in an effort to extend the reach of Google's Internet services and mapping imagery literally into outer space.

Oftentimes, doctors will suggest or invite a person's significant other to be there as a means of comfort and support. But recent research suggests that, for some women, having a partner present may cause more pain than comfort.

Researchers have found a way to make running and walking seem less long and tiresome. People who narrow their attention and focus on a specific object in the distance can motivate themselves to push on.

Elon Musk is the ambitious founder and CEO of SpaceX, a private company that has won more launch contracts than anyone else in the launch business. In this lesson excerpt, Musk explains his approach to innovation in the space race. The full lesson, available on Big Think+, offers strategies for identifying an industry worthy of disruption.

Andrew McAfee of the MIT Sloan School of Management discusses the concept of creative destruction, which explains the phenomenon of automation simultaneously wiping out existing industries while creating new ones in their place.

Perception is everything–it dictates how we behave and interact with others, but also how we treat ourselves. For teenagers perceptions about weight can often be skewed, which could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy

Office work isn't good for our health, sitting for long stretches of time is killing us. Treadmill desks offer a unique solution to those of us who are desk-bound for the better part of the work week. But can we continue to work productively while we walk?

How often a film is referenced in other films is a better determiner of how important the work is than the combined efforts of reviewers, critics, awards, and box office sales.

We owe our origins to the stars. But it’s not the fast catastrophes that made us possible, but a slow, burning romance. “It took less than an hour to make […]

One corner of the animal kingdom is immune from extinction: the monsters that thrive in our imagination (and on this map).

Yesterday Facebook updated the News Feed to attempt to prevent the spread of hoax news stories. What will the fallout look like?

The fallacy doesn’t only wreak havoc on the individual making irrational decisions; it can seriously impact the lives of other people who are affected by those decisions.

Composer Peter Baumann examines the mind's overzealous thirst for information and how anyone can calm their attention.

Peter Baumann explains the pervasiveness and usefulness of bias in human cognition.

Using Experimental Philosophy to Shift Perspective, with Jonathon Keats Jonathon Keats introduces his workshop by listing the following five rules for looking at the world like an experimental philosopher: 1. […]

Keats explains how he combined string theory with San Francisco real estate to explore the relationships between paradoxical concepts.

Keats explains how marriage can be treated as a metaphor by explaining the process by which two people can become married not by government definition, but by a law of nature, thanks to advances in quantum physics.

Keats explains how a thought experiment in which he attempts to genetically engineer God allowed him to create a situation in which science and religion became compatible.

Keats explains an experiment in which he opened a restaurant for plants and how it helped spur an exploration of cuisine as cultural trademark.