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How music rewires the human body, in 59 minutes
Professor Michael Spitzer argues that music is something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feeling.
with
Michael Spitzer
You're traveling back through layer upon layer of your brain, which is why I call music a sort of umbilical cord back to mother nature. It's mental time travel. The astonishing fact is musical training rewires the brain.
The mindset shift that ended my Sunday-night dread
Your to-do list isn't a debt to pay off. It's a menu to choose from.
by
Danny Kenny
How helping your rivals makes you harder to beat
A counterpoint to zero-sum thinking from Japan.
Zugunruhe: The restless sign that something needs to change
A free and happy bird does not pace the room.
The mindset shift that ended my Sunday-night dread
Your to-do list isn't a debt to pay off. It's a menu to choose from.
by
Danny Kenny
The radical act of slowing down
A meditation on how our obsession with speed and productivity undermines our health, relationships, and chances for lasting success.
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The surprising reason why Americans sound, well, American
Long before today's debates, immigration was already transforming the American accent into something distinctively its own.
How the hidden language of life’s spaces quietly reveals our values
From Swedish playgrounds to American kitchens, how we design our spaces broadcasts our priorities and can help spark broader cultural shifts.
5 ways ancient Persia shaped our modern world
From landscaped gardens to road systems, the Persians were among the first to create many things we still enjoy today.
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Pause the busyness of life to reflect on ourselves, our relationships, and the Universe.
with
Jonny Thomson
Philip Pullman: The thing every writer needs to overcome
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The “rawdogging” trend: A new term for an ancient practice
TikTok gave an old practice a terrible name. Neuroscience explains why it actually works.
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Aztec philosophy: How lucky you are to not be in prison right now
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The most important question to ask yourself about your life’s purpose
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The solar revolution turning sunlight into synthetic fuel
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Rome’s triumph was the ancient world’s most effective piece of propaganda
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A brief history of the cosmic distance record
Only nearby objects appear to the naked eye. With telescopes of all types, especially in space, we've smashed those records many times over.
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There's a lot of room in interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, but just how low the densities go is truly mind-boggling.
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Big ideas. Thoughtful conversations. One book at a time.
Pompeii wasn’t frozen in time. Its lost voices are still speaking to us.
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As mental health diagnoses become more common and expansive, the labels meant to help us understand our suffering may instead oversimplify it.
Learn business from the world’s biggest thinkers.
The false urgency myth, and why we confuse busyness with importance
Our obsession with speed and productivity creates unnecessary pressure that quietly fuels burnout and anxiety.
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When leaders embrace positive personal energy, everyone feels the benefits — in trust, innovation and creativity.
The best leaders don’t share traits. They do this instead.
Leadership isn’t about mastering a fixed set of skills, but creating the meaningful, human-centered experiences that inspire others.
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Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience
“We can use neuroscience and tools from psychology to learn how to take advantage of anxiety.” From Zen Buddhism to flow state, these 3 experts explain how to hack your brain.
The Irish language is having a moment — and running out of time
Gaeilge is trending culturally. So why is it, according to census data, also dying?
The Strait of Hormuz is today’s energy chokepoint. China is tomorrow’s.
As the global economy moves beyond oil, the strategic importance of the world’s most critical hydrocarbon chokepoint is likely to decline rapidly.
How the modern world turned gray (and why color may be coming back)
The ideology, economics, and psychology behind the modern world's draining of color from homes, cars, and everyday objects.
Ghost map: Europe’s first glimpse of Tenochtitlan shows a city already destroyed
This 1524 map of the Aztec capital was a window into an exotic otherworld — and largely a fiction.
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A physicist explains what the Kardashev scale gets wrong
The famous framework ranks civilizations by energy use — but ignores a critical factor that can halt their progress.
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Aerial aliens: Why cloudy worlds might make detecting life easier
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The next great leap in evolution may lie beyond Earth
NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.