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Our sense of smell is the most powerful when it comes to evoking memories, so when smells vanish, we lose a whole dimension of the world. Now a new movement wants to change that.
Every day we have to make decisions that involve evaluating or choosing between options, often without much information to go on. So how do we prevent analysis paralysis?
The fusion of mind and machine—what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity—depends on the faulty premise that our understanding of neurobiology increases exponentially.
David Brooks has a very thoughtful column on the fact that a lot of soaring health care costs have to do using all means available to keep very sick people […]
Neuroscience and game theory may offer some insight into the current stalemate, suggesting that a sense of moral superiority could be disrupting a natural tendency to cooperate.
We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.
Riley Lark asks, 'What's at the heart of your classroom?' At the heart of mine are the concepts of student agency and continuous reflection, revision, and renewal. I teach graduate students: […]
Are alternative medical treatments like acupuncture and homeopathy scams or do they account for the mind's influence in overall health in a way that traditional medicine does not?
The evidence is overwhelming that declining vaccination rates are contributing to outbreaks of disease. What should we do about people who decline vaccination for themselves or their children?
By building community groups and cooperating with other developing nations, China is tackling its AIDS epidemic. It has also created needle-exchanges and safer blood transfusions.
While the hormone-disrupting chemical BPA has been eliminated from baby bottles and other containers, current regulation makes it impossible to know which ones are chemical-free.
To fight child obesity, the federal government wants to limit the kinds of foods available to children. The food industry has already proposed its own set of weaker standards.
There are pluses and minuses to living with pets, not only with respect to your happiness and housekeeping, but also with respect to your physiological and psychological well-being.
Do you have the ethical obligation to inform a friend if their spouse is cheating? Is love even ethical at all? The Ethicist Randy Cohen weighs in.
From stock trading to lawmaking to data-driven school reform, we are becoming increasingly dependent on mathematical models to explain the slippery complexity of human nature.
What it means to go beyond seeing and to actually observe.
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Big Think is searching for a tagline and we want your help! Below you'll find a long list of taglines suggested by Big Think's staff and friends. You will find […]
The Dutch-born biologist Frans de Waal has chosen to study not what makes humankind vile and mean but rather what causes us to rise up in support of others, i.e. our moral potential.
Composer, singer, mother, AIDS activist; Alicia Keys wears many different hats, but they all seem to match her spirit of self-respect, humility, and desire to be a role model for her son.