Unique Speakers Provide Spark at PINC Conference

Knots in your shoulders over job security? Stressed over the persistent clacking noise under the hood, from those wafer-thin walls between you and loutish neighbors, or from trying to recover your online identity plundered by hackers?

Maybe what you need is the Cyrano, a portable Bluetooth-enabled gizmo that can emit an array of aromas capable of soothing and perhaps even eradicating those anxieties with a mere tap of a smartphone app. At least, that’s what Harvard inventor David Edwards told a crowd assembled at the Sarasota Opera House Thursday morning for the third annual PINC (People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity) conference.

“It allows you to design your personal space with digital scent that varies in time and can accompany music and film or simply accompany you at home or as you’re in the kitchen,” said Edwards, whose device will launch nationally next year. ”... It can actually have an emotive impact on you for as long as you need it, to lift you up and calm you down or help you focus.”

For the third straight year, an eclectic, quirky, unpredictable international lineup of speakers took turns offering pep talks on the human condition, ominous reality checks and glimpses of the future in 20-minute stanzas. For those who ponied up $425 a ticket, the nine-hour experience included three meals and, for the third straight year, according to host Anand Pallegar, the event sold out all 540 seats.

In scenes Pallegar refers to as “a bubblebath for your mind,” sound effects artist Marko Cotanzo demystified those crisp cinematic footfalls across snowy pastures in movies like “Fargo” (he mimics it by twisting fresh stalks of celery), and ecologist Iain Little showed how to literally bend trees into furniture by growing them from chair-shaped plastic molds. It’s an ancient art, by the way, and it’s being revitalized because of its ability to absorb more carbon dioxide than conventional furniture production emits.

Five-foot two, 130-pound Jen Welter described a litany of setbacks she endured in advancing her athletic career — too small, said the know-it-alls — until last year, when she became the first female coach in the NFL, with the Arizona Cardinals. “It was not a dream that I was ever permitted to have, because there was nobody I could look at and say ‘I want to walk a mile in her shoes’ ... But now it’s the new normal. Any little girl can look at the field and say hey, that’s where I want to be.”

But there were cautionary tales as well, most notably by clinical psychologist David LaPorte, who laid out America’s escalating trend of clinical paranoia, fueled by the witches’ brew of information and surveillance technology, declining confidence in government and the blurred lines between reality and entertainment. “We are living today, all of us, in highly experimental times,” he said. “We are all waking up every day and pretty much finding ourselves in a frontier which is really not obvious, actually.”

Attendees also got a chance to see footage of Ringling College of Art and Design President — and former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame CEO — Larry Thompson attempt to recreate James Brown’s “I Feel Good” dance moves. Ringling is PINC’s presenting partner, and Thompson held America’s education system responsible for the “atrophy” of students’ creative, intuitive left brain. “We don’t need more multiple choice tests,” he said. “We need more tests with multiple answers.”

The consensus show-stopper, however, was Colorado State University professor Temple Grandin, who channeled her autism into plumbing revolutionary insights into animal behavior. Grandin seized on Thompson’s theme about a flawed educational system and pointed to luminaries such as Jane Goodall, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison and Steven Spielberg as potential candidates for failure in this era of standardized testing.

“Educators have got to not screen out unique minds — I’m very concerned with what’s going on. They’re talented and smart, and nothing is being done to develop their skills. We now have 13 seconds going on 12 seconds left, thank you very much!” she concluded, bringing the crowd to its feet.