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As humans, we instinctively understand that time has profound worth, regardless of any workplace benefits. This is what sabbatical alumni mean when they ascribe a feeling of humanity to their time off. Unfortunately, the burden of proof for many is to somehow provide an equation of increased productivity. While this misses the point of what taking time off is all about, there is a lens from psychology that can help us understand the benefits in more tangible terms: conservation of resources theo

Physician Giulia Enders spent years studying the gut before realizing no organ works alone. Here, she walks through 5 body parts — the lung, the immune system, the skin, the muscles, and the brain — and what each one reveals about how we work, heal, and recover. This video Physician: The outdated mindset that gets in the way of our healing is featured on Big Think .

Big Think hosted its inaugural live event to bring our summer special issue, The Opt-Out Nation , to life. Join our candid conversation with the editors and writers behind it, featuring voices from The New York Times , WIRED , and County Highway . Hosted by Big Think producer and director Dan Hayes. This video Live with Big Think: Inside “The Opt-Out Nation” is featured on Big Think .

When we gaze out into the abyss of space, it seems like the most peaceful, serene of sights. Night after night, the planets and our Moon migrate predictably — like clockwork — while the stars, the Milky Way, and even extragalactic objects hardly change at all over time. Sure, there are occasional cataclysms, including stars that die and new lights that briefly appear before fading away, as the shining stars burn through their fuel, evolve, and sometimes even interact. But space itself, although

Psychologist Paul Bloom explains why morality, the thing that makes cooperation and trust possible, is also what drives cruelty, cycles of revenge, and wars where both sides believe they’re the moral ones. This video The psychology of revenge, in 19 minutes is featured on Big Think .

From writing ‘Cop Killer’ to playing a cop on SVU , ICE-T is no stranger to personal evolution. After losing both parents by seventh grade, he was sent to Los Angeles, where he learned to survive without a family. Here, he hustled for money and respect until rap gave him another route. Eventually, acting opened another path, forcing him to step outside the persona he built to protect himself. Now, in his late 60s, he understands that the chaos of his early life existed to propel him forward, and

There are a lot of people who think they know what science is, what science tells us, and how to evaluate claims based on their scientific merits. But are their assessments accurate? How do you, yourself, conceive of science? Do you do what most people do, and default to what you learned about science across a variety of classes in school, with a layer of cynicism and skepticism layered atop it? That’s understandable, as many of us remember being taught “facts” in our science classes that later

If you spend any time on the artsy and philosophical side of social media (of which I am a proud denizen), you will eventually stumble upon some nostalgia-made-cool. I am as guilty as the rest. Because English has only a few words for nostalgia-adjacent emotions — like heartache, homesickness, or sorrow — English speakers tend to grasp thirstily for what other languages have to say. And other languages certainly seem to have richer accounts of a complex emotion. In Portuguese, you have “ saudade

I have struggled to set goals for most of my life. I’ve wondered for a while what they actually do for me. When I was younger, my dad had us write down big, ambitious, long-term goals. I still have some of those handwritten notes. Two of them were: 1. Earn a college scholarship for academics or athletics. 2. After college, get a job that I actually like instead of just worrying about money. Both came true. So, here’s a reasonable question: Did they happen because I wrote them down? Or because I

During most times of the year, when you look up at a dark, clear night sky, the stars, planets, and perhaps the Moon shine brightly, along with, if you’re lucky, a view of the plane of the Milky Way. As far as objects moving through the sky go, you’re usually far more likely to see things with artificial lights, like airplanes or satellites, than you are meteors. Across the entire sky, during most times of the year, you’re lucky if you can spot 2 or 3 meteors per hour: caused by random pieces of

After fracturing my humerus in an arm-wrestling match, something happened that I wasn’t prepared for. For the first time in my life, I lost the ability to exercise; the one thing that had always anchored my mental health. My mood began to unravel. The only solutions I knew were the ones I’d been taught in medical school: therapy or medication. My experience isn’t unique; it reflects a much larger problem in how we currently treat depression. An estimated 1.17 billion people live with a mental di

Out there in the Universe, a similar cosmic story plays out time and time again: the stellar life cycles. A massive, cold cloud of gaseous material, under the power of its own self-gravitation, begins to contract. As clumps within that gas get denser, the cloud fragments, with each fragment collapsing on its way to become a protostar. The most massive and dense clumps, initially, attract surrounding matter the fastest, growing into the most massive of these new stars, where around 50% of all suc

Low-agency people tend to believe in what I call the “myth of willpower,” the idea that virtue lies in exerting extreme effort to overcome obstacles. This is different from putting on a show of effort to impress others or to cover your ass. This is about truly believing that success attained without effort is actually bad, bordering on immoral. You can see this in the discourse around Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, in the way some people insist on shaming those who “cheat” at weight loss i