Why does a chord you’ve never heard before make you want to cry? Why do babies respond to rhythm before they’ve heard a single song? Why does the same part of your brain that processes mortal danger also process musical beauty?
The answers reach back 4 million years. Musicologist Michael Spitzer walks us through the natural origins of human music and creativity.
This video A history of music and human creativity on earth is featured on Big Think.
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As far as galaxies go, our Milky Way is a relatively quiet place. Sure, there are star-forming regions that are active right now within our galactic plane, giving birth to thousands of new stars at once over timescales of a few million years, including relatively nearby in places like the Orion Nebula. But most of our galaxy isn’t forming stars, just a few select locations along our spiral arms. In terms of the overall star-formation rate, we form less than one solar mass’s worth of new stars with each year that passes. Even our galactic center is relatively quiet, with just the occasional “blip” in X-ray light emanating from our own supermassive black hole.
Across the Universe, however, there are many galaxies that are much more active than we are. This includes:
galaxies that are undergoing intense episodes of star-formation across large regions,
galaxies where gas in the central regions are rapidly forming new stars all at once,
and galaxies whose central nucleus is actively feeding right now, creating copious high-energy signatures that our own galaxy lacks.
While there are a few active galaxies that ... Continue Reading »
For decades, the formula for career success was simple: go to school, get a job, climb the ladder. But the ladder is now collapsing before our eyes. And honestly, good riddance. The career ladder isn’t just an outdated metaphor — it actively blocks people from finding more fulfilling work.
Think about it this way: In school, there are clear markers for success. The goal is to get good grades. This continues into entry-level roles, where workers strive for raises and promotions. Tracked careers like law and consulting are attractive, at least in part, because they offer legible paths for advancement. Rather than having to grapple with what you personally value, you can always reach for the next rung.
I call this “ladder logic.” Ladder logic is the belief that higher is always better — and that progress only counts if other people can see it. Ladder logic creates what William Deresiewicz, a professor of English at Yale University, calls “world-class hoop jumpers.” In a now-famous commencement speech, Deresiewicz observed that his students could memorize any formula, ace any test, and “climb the ... Continue Reading »
I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink.
A mother walks along the path in front of us. She’s pushing a stroller and looking flustered. She’s looking flustered because her son is being an ass. “No, Matt,” she shouts. “Stop it. Stop. It!”
Matt is carrying a stick and whacking flowers. He walks a few paces, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freudian death drive. Or perhaps he’s just a boy who likes whacking things.
Now, I don’t really care about flowers. They’re pretty enough, and the world is undeniably better for their existence, but one rose is just as sweet as all the others, ... Continue Reading »
The AI doomers have been particularly active these last several months, ramping up their descriptions of all the bad things that are going to happen any moment and all the disasters that will emerge for sure in the next decade. I have been mostly heads down on deadline writing a book that tells the opposite story, focusing on the many positive things that are now possible through the next 25 years.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 will lay out what I call a “new grand narrative” of how America could harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive an era of great progress and make a much better world. The book won’t be available until early next year, so I thought I would use this month’s essay to quickly touch on some of the many positive things that are now within reach thanks to the recent arrival of AI, clean energy technologies, and bioengineering.
I’m writing the following essay from the perspective of an American in the year 2050. She is looking back and briefly outlining some of the changes that ... Continue Reading »
Time feels like the most obvious, standard metric in our world – until you ask a physicist like Sean Carroll about it. Underneath our widely accepted perceptions of linearity lies a much more interesting and complex world.
Beneath these assumptions lies the most complex, unsolved question in physics: Why does time have any direction at all?
This video Sean Carroll: The past, present, and future exist simultaneously is featured on Big Think.
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David Reich is a geneticist at Harvard whose lab helped pioneer the field of ancient DNA — extracting and sequencing genetic material from human remains thousands of years old. What they found overturned nearly everything scientists thought they knew about where we come from.
Before 2010, the story of human migration was mostly guesswork. Since then, ancient DNA has revealed that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, that a group of steppe nomads reshaped the entire ancestry of Europe, and that in some places the population was replaced so completely that the people living there today share almost no DNA with those who lived there just a few thousand years ago.
This video We’ve been guessing about ancestral history — until now is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
In science, no matter how confident we are in our theories, there’s no substitute for interrogating the natural world by asking it questions about itself directly: through observation and experiment. Sometimes, that requires setting up conditions in a laboratory to create certain events whose outcomes we can measure to whatever precision we desire. At other times, however, it requires looking out into space — at the natural laboratory of the Universe — to observe how nature behaves. No matter what our expectations were beforehand, there’s no substitute for actual data in figuring out how things actually are.
Although Pluto was the first object ever discovered out beyond Neptune, spotted way back in 1930 for the very first time, its atmosphere was only directly discovered and measured in 1988: when an observatory in Earth’s southern hemisphere observed it occulting, or passing in front of, a background star. While many other Kuiper belt occultations have occurred since, only Pluto had ever been shown to have an atmosphere, rendering it unique among the known trans-Neptunian objects.
Until now. In an all new 2026 study led ... Continue Reading »
In 2013, the renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson told Big Think a story about a man who was perhaps the unluckiest farmer in Australia. For generations, the man’s family had farmed the same land, scratching out a living from soil that gave just enough back. Then the rains failed one year too often. The family abandoned the farm and moved to Perth.
Years later, near the end of his father’s life, the man suggested they visit their old place one last time. They drove for hours. Pulling up, the dirt track they remembered was now a paved road. The old farmhouse sat surrounded by buildings, trucks, and cranes. A sign read: “The Western Australian Nickel Company.” A government-commissioned geological survey had discovered a huge seam of nickel running 18 inches below the topsoil. It was worth millions.
The son looked at his father, expecting shock.
“[The father] just burst out laughing,” Robinson said, “because he realized they had spent years, generations, picking out this thin living from this farm, and right beneath the surface there was the treasure trove that would have, you ... Continue Reading »
“The bittersweet memory of that day, eighteen years ago, had never left him. It was the second time he had been sold in his short lifetime, reduced to nothing more than a name and number scratched on a wax tablet, and still no one came to save him. He sometimes saw Poppaea in the streets. He always made sure to avoid her eye.”
This moment is from The Lost Voices of Pompeii, a new book that follows seven historical figures in the hours leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Contrary to what its novelistic style suggests, it is a work of history, not historical fiction. Its author, the historian and archeologist Jess Venner, relies on an increasingly popular research method known as critical fabulation to bring the ruins of Pompeii to life.
As she discussed with Big Think, Lost Voices uses critical fabulation to dispel many common myths surrounding the world-famous Italian city and its inhabitants.
Giving a voice to the voiceless
Put simply, critical fabulation is the practice of using evidence to speculate about historical events for which ... Continue Reading »
As far as galaxies go, our Milky Way is a relatively quiet place. Sure, there are star-forming regions that are active right now within our galactic plane, giving birth to thousands of new stars at once over timescales of a few million years, including relatively nearby in places like the Orion Nebula. But most of our galaxy isn’t forming stars, just a few select locations along our spiral arms. In terms of the overall star-formation rate, we form less than one solar mass’s worth of new stars with each year that passes. Even our galactic center is relatively quiet, with just the occasional “blip” in X-ray light emanating from our own supermassive black hole.
Across the Universe, however, there are many galaxies that are much more active than we are. This includes:
galaxies that are undergoing intense episodes of star-formation across large regions,
galaxies where gas in the central regions are rapidly forming new stars all at once,
and galaxies whose central nucleus is actively feeding right now, creating copious high-energy signatures that our own galaxy lacks.
While there are a few active galaxies that ... 
For decades, the formula for career success was simple: go to school, get a job, climb the ladder. But the ladder is now collapsing before our eyes. And honestly, good riddance. The career ladder isn’t just an outdated metaphor — it actively blocks people from finding more fulfilling work.
Think about it this way: In school, there are clear markers for success. The goal is to get good grades. This continues into entry-level roles, where workers strive for raises and promotions. Tracked careers like law and consulting are attractive, at least in part, because they offer legible paths for advancement. Rather than having to grapple with what you personally value, you can always reach for the next rung.
I call this “ladder logic.” Ladder logic is the belief that higher is always better — and that progress only counts if other people can see it. Ladder logic creates what William Deresiewicz, a professor of English at Yale University, calls “world-class hoop jumpers.” In a now-famous commencement speech, Deresiewicz observed that his students could memorize any formula, ace any test, and “climb the ... 
I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink.
A mother walks along the path in front of us. She’s pushing a stroller and looking flustered. She’s looking flustered because her son is being an ass. “No, Matt,” she shouts. “Stop it. Stop. It!”
Matt is carrying a stick and whacking flowers. He walks a few paces, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freudian death drive. Or perhaps he’s just a boy who likes whacking things.
Now, I don’t really care about flowers. They’re pretty enough, and the world is undeniably better for their existence, but one rose is just as sweet as all the others, ... 
The AI doomers have been particularly active these last several months, ramping up their descriptions of all the bad things that are going to happen any moment and all the disasters that will emerge for sure in the next decade. I have been mostly heads down on deadline writing a book that tells the opposite story, focusing on the many positive things that are now possible through the next 25 years.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 will lay out what I call a “new grand narrative” of how America could harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive an era of great progress and make a much better world. The book won’t be available until early next year, so I thought I would use this month’s essay to quickly touch on some of the many positive things that are now within reach thanks to the recent arrival of AI, clean energy technologies, and bioengineering.
I’m writing the following essay from the perspective of an American in the year 2050. She is looking back and briefly outlining some of the changes that ... 
In science, no matter how confident we are in our theories, there’s no substitute for interrogating the natural world by asking it questions about itself directly: through observation and experiment. Sometimes, that requires setting up conditions in a laboratory to create certain events whose outcomes we can measure to whatever precision we desire. At other times, however, it requires looking out into space — at the natural laboratory of the Universe — to observe how nature behaves. No matter what our expectations were beforehand, there’s no substitute for actual data in figuring out how things actually are.
Although Pluto was the first object ever discovered out beyond Neptune, spotted way back in 1930 for the very first time, its atmosphere was only directly discovered and measured in 1988: when an observatory in Earth’s southern hemisphere observed it occulting, or passing in front of, a background star. While many other Kuiper belt occultations have occurred since, only Pluto had ever been shown to have an atmosphere, rendering it unique among the known trans-Neptunian objects.
Until now. In an all new 2026 study led ... 
In 2013, the renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson told Big Think a story about a man who was perhaps the unluckiest farmer in Australia. For generations, the man’s family had farmed the same land, scratching out a living from soil that gave just enough back. Then the rains failed one year too often. The family abandoned the farm and moved to Perth.
Years later, near the end of his father’s life, the man suggested they visit their old place one last time. They drove for hours. Pulling up, the dirt track they remembered was now a paved road. The old farmhouse sat surrounded by buildings, trucks, and cranes. A sign read: “The Western Australian Nickel Company.” A government-commissioned geological survey had discovered a huge seam of nickel running 18 inches below the topsoil. It was worth millions.
The son looked at his father, expecting shock.
“[The father] just burst out laughing,” Robinson said, “because he realized they had spent years, generations, picking out this thin living from this farm, and right beneath the surface there was the treasure trove that would have, you ... 
“The bittersweet memory of that day, eighteen years ago, had never left him. It was the second time he had been sold in his short lifetime, reduced to nothing more than a name and number scratched on a wax tablet, and still no one came to save him. He sometimes saw Poppaea in the streets. He always made sure to avoid her eye.”
This moment is from The Lost Voices of Pompeii, a new book that follows seven historical figures in the hours leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Contrary to what its novelistic style suggests, it is a work of history, not historical fiction. Its author, the historian and archeologist Jess Venner, relies on an increasingly popular research method known as critical fabulation to bring the ruins of Pompeii to life.
As she discussed with Big Think, Lost Voices uses critical fabulation to dispel many common myths surrounding the world-famous Italian city and its inhabitants.
Giving a voice to the voiceless
Put simply, critical fabulation is the practice of using evidence to speculate about historical events for which ...