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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
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The future of programming is a language with a unified set of guidelines for how to combine different programming paradigms.
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C should have been integrated as a subset of C++, says Stroustrup.
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In the late 1970s, Stroustrup applied the idea of “classes” to the C programming language to create a new language that allows for high level abstraction—but is efficient and close […]
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A conversation with the creator of C++.
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Many of the brain’s functions are designed to initiate a response to a detected imbalance. As our bodies strive to maintain homeostasis, our brains send signals that make us do […]
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Our main mode of control has to do with our degree of knowledge and our understanding of the world. As we change what we know about the world, we change […]
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We have brains because they optimize our bodies’ survival. Meanwhile, the body itself is the border in the translation service that will allow the outside world to come into the […]
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An emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body. Its purpose is to make life more survivable by taking care of a danger or taking […]
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While our own personal histories happen one event at a time, our brains make sense of our lives by stringing these events together in an structured way.
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The mind allows us to understand what the world is like, but it is consciousness that gives us the subjective vantage to say “I am here, I exist, I have […]
37mins
A conversation with the behavioral neurobiologist.
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Instead of recording every event in your life, the brain records conjunctions of the occurrence of certain events. Out of the conjunction, it can then replay and reconstruct.
Ever since she wrote a New York Sun article about why she let her 9-year old son ride the subway alone, journalist Lenore Skenazy has been lambasted by the media […]
Perhaps the most effective frame used by opponents of nuclear energy is that it is simply not “cost effective.” Not only is it wasteful, argue opponents, but government subsidies are […]
We of course have the two robot landers on the surface of Mars (Spirit and Opportunity). The Spirit Rover recently went into hibernation mode and is no longer communicating with […]
“Vision,” Stanford’s Bill Newsome likes to say, “does not happen in the eye. It happens in the brain.” As I mentioned in my last post, this is a general theme […]
Now that August, Big Think's month of thinking dangerously, is over, we'd like you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to 10 of the radical ideas we presented.
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Parents need to wean themselves off of the idea that they must be constantly available to their child and vice versa.
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Author Lenore Skenazy is tired of helicopter parents messing up their kids.
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At some point in the past thirty years it became taboo to let your kids play outside without supervision. What's with that?