For Business
Learning & Development
Develop leaders in your organization with Big Think+ classes
Custom Content
Create premium thought leadership and storytelling with Big Think Creative
Advertising Campaigns
Reach the smartest audience on the Internet with Big Think editorial integrations
Live Events
Bring your people and ideas to life with Big Think Events
Learning & Development
Develop leaders in your organization with Big Think+ classes
Custom Content
Create premium thought leadership and storytelling with Big Think Creative
Advertising Campaigns
Reach the smartest audience on the Internet with Big Think editorial integrations
Live Events
Bring your people and ideas to life with Big Think Events
Search
In collaboration with Exponential Finance
Whether we're professional athletes or cellphone gamers, falling just short of our goals can be motivating, not crushing.
Researchers are using music to light up unconscious minds, but the results only bring more questions about its effectiveness for coma patients.
A study suggests that long-term depression can more than double one's chances of suffering a stroke.
Scientists are keeping their eyes on social media in order to track and map the appearance of auroras.
The transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson stressed that maintaining an open mind requires the ability to understand that contrary opinions are not innately steeped in ill will.
Businesses that make their employees feel young for their age get more out of their workforce.
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."
1mins
Technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil says our brains, as complex as they are, are constrained by an upper limit of 300 million “pattern recognizers.” But our future, cloud-based “virtual brains” will have no such constraints.
Science and all of society benefit from an informed and knowledgeable public, yet not enough academics are recognized by scientific bodies for their contributions to popular writing.
The unique sight of a comet only scratches the surface of an amazing story. “Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes […]
How food, art, and design come together to display a beauty rarely seen. “That’s what you get for being food.” -Margaret Atwood As anyone who’s ever played the classic arcade […]
Few business buzzphrases draw as much interest (and ire) as “disruptive innovation.” Disrupt or die, the thinking goes. Old orders must make way for new. At the Barnes Foundation, home of Dr. Albert Barnes’ meticulously and idiosyncratically ordered collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces left just so since his death in 1951, three artistic innovators aim at questioning and challenging Dr. Barnes’ old order. Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, Fred Wilson: The Order of Things invites three award-winning, contemporary installation artists to disrupt the existing paradigm at the Barnes and assist us in seeing Dr. Barnes and his collection in a whole new way.
People who hold the belief that there are people who are "pure evil" are more willing to support harsher prison sentencing and the death penalty for those individuals.
It’s the oldest, most distant light we’ve ever seen. But where, exactly, is it? “We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won’t need to […]
2mins
Peter Baumann, musician and founder of a think tank that explores the experience of being human, on "hedonic" and "eudaemonic" pleasure, and how to harness both.
2mins
The fate of the world may depend on our ability to teach “global compassion,” empathy for the suffering of people we’ve never met. rn
Cars rule the roads, but how much would we save if we built better infrastructures to support bikes?
New research shows that women prefer someone modeling clothing that looks more like them.
"Mansplaining" and "Manspreading," too, are thriving on the chatterweb. Like "Dadbod," they satirize a world of ridiculous men who have no idea what's going on.