STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Sage School’s Chris McAvoy called for a new way of teaching. And Alex Weber exhorted the audience to create joy out of pain.
They were ideas worth sharing, decided the TEDxSunValley team. And that’s why they were among 15 speakers that took the stage Sunday for the third annual TEDxSunValley.
“TEDxSunValley is an amazing opportunity to give the amazing people in this community a chance to get their ideas out,” said Kim Castellano, who co-founded TEDxSunValley with Aimee Christensen.
This year’s 15 candidates were chosen from more than 50 applicants. More than half were from out of town.
Those who addressed a full house at the Sun Valley Opera House included a 17-year-old high school student from Meridian who lamented how both uninvolved and over-involved parents set the stage for mediocre expectations among their youth.
And it included Wood River Valley resident Blair Brown, who took the audience back to 1930 when cannabis was found in the popcorn boxes at movie theaters and in the curtains that ringed the movie theaters. Then, she noted, “a propaganda campaign” was waged against cannabis via films like “Reefer Madness.”
Dr. Krista Burns, a 2003 Wood River High School graduate, warned against “digital dementia,” a term first coined by a neuroscientist in 2012 to describe how the overuse of digital technology is relating to short-term memory dysfunction and other forms of deteriorating cerebral performance.
Posture is declining at the speed of technology as users develop “tech neck,” a forward head posture caused by looking down at their handheld devices for prolonged periods of time, said Burns, who heads up the American Posture Institute and has a chiropractic practice in Puerto Rico.
Burns, who raced with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation and still has a home in Sun Valley, has long been a student of posture. She had hoped to compete in the Olympics as a freestyle mogul skier but suffered a back injury at the U.S. Ski Team selections and was pulled from the competition. That, however set her on the path to being a chiropractic and, eventually, her TED talk.
The poor posture leads to imbalances in different parts of the brain and an abnormal gait that resembles the hunched-over shuffle of those with Parkinson’s Disease. The latter can be a predictor of dementia, she said.
“It took us millions of years to get here,” she said, referring to the evolution of humans to an upright position, “Yet it’s de-evolving at the speed of technology.”
Jeanne Liston of The Hunger Coalition took part in the first TEDxSunValley and coached four of this year’s speakers.
“It was such a relief not to be up on stage,” she said, acknowledging the stress many of the speakers feel as they hone their speeches in the days before the event.
Liston said officials of Ketchum’s Limelight Hotel sent links to her talk about The Hunger Coalition’s efforts to decrease the stigma for those needing help from food banks to representatives of Aspen Skiing Company. And she got queries from people around the country wanting to know how they could incorporate what The Hunger Coalition is doing into their own programs.
“I’m really proud of my accomplishment—it was a huge undertaking, especially since I don’t like public speaking,” she said of her talk. “And, as a result of that talk, I’m now more comfortable speaking in front of people.”
Sue Dyer, who joined the audience around a taco bar set up for the event outside the Sun Valley Opera House, said she loved picking up on certain phrases, such as that of one TED speaker who noted that “Martin Luther King didn’t say, ‘I had a nightmare.’ ”
“Rather than waking up seeing hopelessness and murder and mayhem on the news feed, I love waking up and looking at TED Talks. What these people are talking about is innovative. TED Talks are concrete evidence of movement,” she added.
Aimee Christensen agreed.
“It’s a roadmap to how to create a better community. Between the TED videos we’ve shown and the speakers that took part, we’ve had talks addressing everything from housing and income disparities to talks addressing fire risk.”
The fourth annual TedxSunValley will be held Sept. 21, 2019 at the Argyros Performing Arts Center in Ketchum.