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Big Think is a multimedia knowledge company with a mission to help people get smarter, faster. To achieve this we create content on three different platforms, focused on three different outcomes:

1. Our free public website, BigThink.com, and our public YouTube channel help our global audience identify

and understand the big ideas that they need to know today. Through idea-driven video interviews with thousands of global thought leaders, including Eric Schmidt, Larry Summers, Oliver Sacks, Peter Thiel, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many, many more.

2. Our Mentor Subscription Content connects our world-class mentors with a global community of smart, driven users to teach the habits of mind and people skills they need to live happier, healthier, more productive lives.

3. Our Big Think+ professional development training content helps results-driven companies provide the knowledge and skills that will make their employees at every level more productive, engaged, motivated and happy.

09/28/2025

3 reasons men are in crisis | Christine Emba

When I was 16 years old, I sat in a crowded assembly hall on a wobbly plastic chair, and I listened to Mr. Smith tell me...
09/28/2025

When I was 16 years old, I sat in a crowded assembly hall on a wobbly plastic chair, and I listened to Mr. Smith tell me why I should study history. All of the teachers had to do it. “Sell your subject,” the headmaster had said. “Make the kids want to pick it.”

Some teachers did so with the grudging monotone of the forced and underpaid employee. Some did it with the exhausting energy of a fanatic. Ms. Vasey, the physics teacher, even dressed up as the solar system. But Mr. Smith decided to win us over with the cold, lofty logic of an Oxford graduate.

“History is like a guidebook for how to live,” he began. “We can learn from people’s mistakes and can unpack where things went wrong. Almost all the greatest leaders in the world knew their history, and almost all of the biggest mistakes were because people didn’t study it enough. As the German philosopher Hegel put it, ‘We learn from history that we do not learn from history.’”

Mr. Smith’s point was that humans have this depressing tendency to repeat the same mistakes. We blunder onwards, ignoring all of the lessons of the billions of humans who have walked this planet before. “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

It’s a good point, and someone should have said it. But the problem is that Hegel actually meant the opposite.

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Read the full article by Jonny Thomson: https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/hegel-quot-misused-and-misunderstood/

Art credit: Sarah Soryal

09/26/2025

How to communicate with aliens | David Kipping

Whether you work at a modest startup or a multimillion dollar company, chances are you have heard of the Business Model ...
09/26/2025

Whether you work at a modest startup or a multimillion dollar company, chances are you have heard of the Business Model Canvas (BMC). Similar to architectural blueprints or circuit diagrams, these standardized templates provide simplified overviews of complex organizations, and can be used to turn an ailing company around, or design a healthy one from the ground up.

First developed by business theorist Alex Osterwalder and computer scientist Yves Pigneur in the early 2000s as part of Osterwalder’s PhD thesis, the BMC framework has since developed into one of the most well-known and widely used business modeling tools on the planet, embedding itself in MBA curricula and guiding decision-making processes in C-suites and incubators alike.

In addition to authoring several bestselling books on business modeling — including 2020’s The Invincible Company — Osterwalder now serves as the founder and CEO of Strategyzer, an innovation consultancy and software development firm that helps companies design, test, and scale new business models.

Osterwalder joined Big Think over Zoom from his native Switzerland to talk about the merits of “optimizing happiness,” what many people continue to get wrong about Steve Jobs, and the mentality that allowed Jeff Bezos to set up Amazon for future success.

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Read the full interview by Tim Brinkhof here: https://bigthink.com/business/how-to-bust-the-innovation-myth/

09/25/2025

Why "speed learning" is bu****it | Marvin Liyanage

Sources:

Rayner, K., Schotter, E., Masson, M., Potter, M., & Treiman, R. (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17, 34 - 4. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615623267

Murphy, D. H., Hoover, K. M., Agadzhanyan, K., Kuehn, J. C., & Castel, A. D. (2022). Learning in double time: The effect of lecture video speed on immediate and delayed comprehension. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(2), 259–270. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3899

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For more about how speed reading lowers comprehension read Ross Pomeroy's latest: https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/neuroscience-speed-reading-bu****it/

9 a.m. on Saturday. I’m sitting at the café, laptop open, surrounded by the chatter of customers, and the scattered debr...
09/25/2025

9 a.m. on Saturday. I’m sitting at the café, laptop open, surrounded by the chatter of customers, and the scattered debris of modern knowledge work. Three half-finished articles. Two consulting projects with looming deadlines. Emails multiplying like rabbits. And somewhere in the mental background, the nagging sense that I should be exercising, calling my parents, and planning next week’s content calendar for Substack.

My attention ping-ponged. The article deadline that felt manageable yesterday now loomed. The client presentation that should take an hour felt like it would consume my entire weekend. Even checking email felt like wading into a swamp.

Everything screamed “urgent,” but nothing felt achievable. I couldn’t see it in the moment, but the scattered feeling stemmed more from how I was directing my attention than a lack of willpower or time management. I used to think successful people innately had better focus. Turns out, they just knew something about their brains that too often escapes the rest of us: It’s possible to direct your attention with the same intentionality with which you direct your muscles at the gym.

We’re facing an attention crisis today that previous generations never had to navigate. Social media notifications, Slack messages, email alerts, and the endless scroll of information have created what researchers call “continuous partial attention.” We’re always on, but never fully focused, just perpetually scattered.

Beyond mere inconvenience, a lack of “full” attention can actively sabotage our most important goals and make everything feel unsatisfying or insurmountable. Each task appears more overwhelming because your attention simultaneously tracks five other “urgent” priorities, all claiming to be the most important. The result can be that all tasks get nudged into the periphery of your attention.

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Read the full article with Danny Kenny and Emily Balcetis: https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/why-your-attention-keeps-slipping-away-and-how-to-get-it-back/

Art credit: Sarah Soryal

In 2020, a small blast ejected debris from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, as it hurtled through space 200 million mi...
09/23/2025

In 2020, a small blast ejected debris from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, as it hurtled through space 200 million miles from Earth. This was caused by the NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex, which collected the resulting dust and returned those samples to Earth, marking the first time a U.S. mission had retrieved material from an asteroid.

Earlier this year, researchers found those samples contained the building blocks for life, including amino acids and nucleobases (which form DNA, among other molecules). That’s not unusual for an asteroid, but what was unexpected was the form those molecules took: roughly half of them being a perfect inverse — a mirror image — of the way those building blocks appear on Earth.

This was interesting timing. Only a few months prior, toward the end of 2024, a team of Nobel-winning biologists and experts — in a paper published in Nature — had raised the alarm on a potential new threat to all living things on Earth. They warned of the potential creation of “mirror life.”

While the naturally occurring mirror molecules hitching a ride on nearby asteroids are not going to have any impact on our home planet, the experts feared that biologists may — in the lab — be able to artificially create entire mirror-image organisms, to potentially disastrous results.

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Read the full article by Thomas Moynihan: https://bigthink.com/the-past/mirror-life-and-the-recurring-nightmare-of-scientific-apocalypse/

Art credit: Sarah Soryal

09/23/2025

How to personalize your leadership | Josh Bersin

09/22/2025

The path to evil | Jonny Thomson Mini Philosophy

Around the turn of the 19th century, a Viennese physician named Franz Joseph Gall proposed a new, and controversial, hyp...
09/22/2025

Around the turn of the 19th century, a Viennese physician named Franz Joseph Gall proposed a new, and controversial, hypothesis about the human brain. Even as a child, Gall was fascinated by the brain and its connection with people’s personalities, and so throughout his career, he intensely studied its anatomy while also gathering data on people’s skull sizes and facial features.

He came to believe that people’s mental faculties were localized within specific brain regions. And because these regions molded the shape of people’s skulls, a trained eye could divinate a person’s capabilities for love, violence, greed, intelligence, and other traits simply by examining their cranial bumps and recessions.

As you’ve probably guessed, Gall’s hypotheses provided the basis for phrenology — though Gall never used that term, preferring the more lexically accurate but less marketable “cranioscopy.” Today, researchers have rejected cranioscopy for its lack of empirical rigor, and the phrenology crazes that followed Gall’s death — spearheaded by grifters like the Fowler Brothers — are recognized as pseudoscientific fads.

But let’s not be too hard on the old Gall. The human brain is an incredibly complex organ, and his research represents some of the earliest attempts to understand it scientifically. In the 200 years since, neuroscientists have learned a lot about the brain’s relationship with intelligence and personality, as well as how its unique regions play both specialized and coordinated roles in bodily and cognitive functions.

Yet many mysteries remain, and plenty of myths and pseudoscientific claims surrounding the brain are still out there — many based on either misunderstandings of the empirical data or the misleading promises of hucksters.

To help us learn more and demystify the brain a bit, we asked Rachel Barr, a neuroscientist and the author of How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, to recommend some books on the subject. She suggested the following five, written by some of the top experts and thinkers in her field.

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Read the full article by Kevin Dickinson here: https://bigthink.com/books/5-brilliant-books-to-demystify-the-brain/

Every once in a while, a book arrives in my inbox that forces me to rethink what I thought I knew about the human mind. ...
09/19/2025

Every once in a while, a book arrives in my inbox that forces me to rethink what I thought I knew about the human mind. Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence is one of those books. Released in August, it has already become a national bestseller — and for good reason.

Fletcher is a rare hybrid: trained as both a neuroscientist and a professor of literature, he teaches at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, the world’s leading academic center for the study of story. His previous titles — Wonderworks and Storythinking — earned him a reputation as a boundary-breaking thinker who blends science, history, and art to explain why stories matter and how they shape human creativity.

With Primal Intelligence, Fletcher goes further. Drawing on unlikely collaborations with the U.S. Army and years studying Shakespeare, he argues that our deepest intelligence isn’t computational at all. It’s rooted in intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense — capacities that modern systems of school and work often suppress, but remain essential for human flourishing.

The timeliness is hard to miss. At a moment when artificial intelligence dominates headlines — and many are anxious that machines might soon replace human creativity — Fletcher insists on the profound difference between algorithm and imagination. AI can detect patterns. Only humans can weave meaning, create serendipity, and grow wiser through story. Primal Intelligence is a reminder that our future depends on those gifts.

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Read the full article by Eric Markowitz: https://bigthink.com/the-long-game/why-your-intuition-imagination-and-emotion-will-outlast-ai/

09/19/2025

Where are the aliens? | David Kipping

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