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Over the course of his life, Roger Anun­sen has been and done many things: A lawyer, teacher, activ­i­ties direc­tor for a local assist­ed-liv­ing home.

He’s also been a pio­neer in the field of brain sci­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it applies in aging. And as one of this year’s speak­ers at TEDxSalem, he’s going to give a glimpse into the future of how sci­ence will alter its under­stand­ing of aging in the brain.

Anun­sen, a Salem native who can trace his Ore­gon roots back to his great-grand­par­ents, start­ed his career as an attor­ney. After grad­u­at­ing from law school at Willamette Uni­ver­si­ty, he went on to work with the Linn Coun­ty pub­lic defend­ers, build­ing a 26-year career in tri­al law.

But 1998, he says, was the year of the burnout.

“I was try­ing to work hard­er instead of smarter,” he said. “I was work­ing longer and longer and I lost my pas­sion for law.”

Anun­sen took a job a few days a week dri­ving a van with an assist­ed-liv­ing facil­i­ty in Salem. Not long after that, he was asked if he want­ed to take over as activ­i­ties direc­tor — a job, he was delight­ed to find, he loved.

“I just treat­ed them all like my Nana,” he said. “I learned from my grand­moth­er, when you ask some­one who is old­er ‘How are you?’ it’s a dead-end ques­tion.”

By that, he means, is that ask­ing some­one how they are tends to elic­it what Anun­sen calls The Organ Recital: A list­ing of com­plaints of the var­i­ous aches and pains that accom­pa­ny grow­ing old­er. When your first response is such a neg­a­tive focus, he explains, it releas­es a chem­i­cal in the human body that just makes it worse.

Instead, he began build­ing activ­i­ties to shift the focus to fun, con­fi­dence-build­ing activ­i­ties.

“I was just try­ing to find some­thing to keep their atten­tion,” he said. “I would just keep what worked and threw out what did­n’t.”

His tech­niques drew the atten­tion of a grad­u­ate stu­dent who hap­pened to be in the build­ing, who then went on to tell their pro­fes­sor. Before long, Anun­sen said, groups of aca­d­e­mics were com­ing to study what he was doing.

“They asked me, if we did clin­i­cal tri­als, would you be will­ing?” he remem­bered. “I did­n’t even know what a clin­i­cal tri­al was.”

Now, Anun­sen is teach­ing cours­es at Port­land Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege; he’s worked for AARP design­ing brain health pro­grams and was a vot­ing del­e­gate at the White House Con­fer­ence on Aging; he’s even had a sci­en­tif­ic paper pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Men­tal Health and Aging.

“It’s excit­ing, and it seems to be get­ting bet­ter,” he said. “It’s hard­er than rock­et sci­ence, but once you boil it down, it’s just get­ting back con­trol.”

Anun­sen keeps up-to-date on the lat­est research being pub­lished on the sub­ject. Just a few weeks ago, there was a par­tic­u­lar­ly thrilling announce­ment made at a glob­al brain sci­ence con­fer­ence that he said fits in nice­ly with his TED talk — but you’ll have to hear him explain it.

“Knowl­edge is pow­er,” he said, when asked what he hopes peo­ple will gain from his TED talk. “And cog­ni­tive decline is not — bold, under­lined — inevitable. There needs to be a nation­al pol­i­cy to edu­cate the pub­lic.”

Get your tick­ets at the His­toric Elsi­nore The­atre or online: http://goo.gl/pI3UJ2.

Mark Frohn­may­er has set up a for­mi­da­ble task for him­self as a TEDx speak­er, he’s going to make math and pol­i­tics inter­est­ing.

How­ev­er, he’s more than ready for the chal­lenge.

Frohn­may­er is one of the faces of recent peti­tion dri­ves seek­ing sup­port for equal­iz­ing the vote in Ore­gon through an open pri­ma­ry sys­tem. Such a sys­tem would lead to vot­ers cast­ing final bal­lots for one of two favored can­di­dates, regard­less of par­ti­san affil­i­a­tion, in any elec­tion.

“The eas­i­est way to trans­form our elec­tions is to change the pri­ma­ry from a rank­ing sys­tem to a rat­ing sys­tem and an open field of can­di­dates with a yes/no option on each one,” Frohn­may­er said.

Frohn­may­er’s back­ground includes sev­er­al years cod­ing video games and, more recent­ly, lead­ing the devel­op­ment of elec­tric-based vehi­cle com­pa­ny Arci­mo­to in Eugene. He said his pas­sion for democ­ra­cy comes from watch­ing his father, Dave Frohn­may­er, lose a guber­na­to­r­i­al cam­paign in 1990 when a far-right can­di­date siphoned off more than 10 per­cent of the vote.

“I’ve been in this mix of math­e­mat­ics and com­put­er sci­ence and immersed in pol­i­tics. It drove me to do a lot of think­ing about vot­ing equal­i­ty and the spoil­er effect,” he said.

Frohn­may­er said equal­iz­ing the vote comes down to coun­ter­act­ing two fun­da­men­tal inequal­i­ties. The first is the rank­ing sys­tem we cur­rent­ly use, which lim­its most elec­tions to two can­di­dates, amounts to one vote divid­ed by the total num­ber of can­di­dates the vot­er likes. The more can­di­dates one prefers, the more that sin­gle vote gets divid­ed. The sec­ond inequity relates more to the closed pri­ma­ry sys­tem in which any can­di­date must pass a “puri­ty test” from the par­ty faith­ful to ascend beyond the open­ing stages of the race.

“When you add up those two inequal­i­ties, the sys­tem is heav­i­ly biased toward mon­ey. Vot­ers become incen­tivized toward the can­di­date in the strongest finan­cial posi­tion on their side,” he said.

In a pri­ma­ry sys­tem with more equi­ty, a bal­lot would include a list of can­di­date names with the option to vote “yes” or “no” on each one, he said. The top two would face each oth­er in the run-off dur­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion. Frohn­may­er said it would be akin to choos­ing whether to like a post on face­book or not, or decid­ing what num­ber of stars to give a prod­uct on amazon.com.

“Even that very sim­ple ‘like’ is more pow­er­ful that our cur­rent rank­ing sys­tem because it com­mu­ni­cates which choic­es you approve. Every sin­gle rat­ing sys­tem affords the chance to cast a bal­anc­ing rat­ing or vote,” Frohn­may­er said. “It removes the lim­i­ta­tion of a sin­gle choice.”

To find out how to become more involved in chang­ing the process, you’ll have to come lis­ten to his talk on Sept. 16.

Get your tick­ets at the His­toric Elsi­nore The­atre or online: http://goo.gl/pI3UJ2.

You can view Frohn­mey­er’s TEDx­Con­cor­dia talk on sus­tain­able trans­porta­tion here.

If you’ve spent a lot of time on the inter­net, par­tic­u­lar­ly social media sites and Buz­zfeed arti­cles, you may be famil­iar with the cat beard trend.

For Cather­ine Miller, her intro­duc­tion to cat beard­ing came at a piv­otal moment in her life.

Some­thing about the sil­ly inter­net images stuck. Miller spent hours look­ing through peo­ple’s pic­tures with their cats (and dogs), find­ing the fun­ni­est ones.

“I laughed so hard, my face hurt, my stom­ach hurt,” she said. “And then I start­ed draw­ing them.”

Miller, a 29-year-old artist born and raised in Port­land, has been an artist all her life. As a child, she immersed her­self in the col­or­ful world of crayons (“not just the cray­on itself, but the wrap­per, too”) and was nev­er with­out a col­or­ing book. Her school­ing was all in art and she has curat­ed a num­ber of exhibits through­out Port­land in a vari­ety of media — paints, sculp­ture, water­col­or, sketch­ing. She’ll work in what­ev­er medi­um feels best suit­ed to a piece, she said, but “if I’m want­i­ng to feel relaxed or feel at home, it’s always with a brush.”

Her art has large­ly includ­ed the same theme. Miller is visu­al­ly impaired (she’s legal­ly blind), and is in fact the first visu­al­ly-impaired artist to grad­u­ate from the Pacif­ic North­west Col­lege of Arts. Since grad­u­a­tion, she has used her work to point out how the fine arts can often fail to cater to dis­abled patrons, and worked to make the fine arts world more inclu­sive. In 2011, she curat­ed an exhib­it called ‘A Some­what Secret Place,’ meant to high­light art cre­at­ed by and for those with dis­abil­i­ties.

She’s been obses­sive­ly draw­ing cat memes from the inter­net since last June.

“Late­ly I’ve switched from just cat beards to inter­net-famous felines, so I’ve been work­ing on hip­ster kit­ty and dub­step kit­ty a lot this week,” she said. “It’s great. I find that I real­ly con­nect with peo­ple that way.”

She sees an impor­tant inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­o­gy, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and, of course, cats. And that inter­sec­tion is with art.

“The job of an artist, real­ly, is to point the gaze of soci­ety at some­thing,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been draw­ing these images. That is, I’m not say­ing it’s great or it’s not great. It is. This is. And per­haps more impor­tant than you were think­ing.”