MONTEREY, Calif. -- When it comes to the pursuit of happiness, everyone, it turns out, has an opinion.
Everyone, as it turns out, just happens to include architects, scientists, explorers, Buddhist monks, comedians, primate researchers, dietitians, deep-sea divers, illusionists and Internet billionaires.
And that was only a partial list of the lineup of speakers and participants at a free-wheeling technology and design conference in Monterey, California, that also attracted corporate executives and famed Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn.
The eclectic group gathered on California's Central Coast to ponder the pursuit of happiness and the shape of the future at the annual TED conference.
TED, an acronym for technology, entertainment and design, brought together an unlikely group of thinkers to swap ideas and garner inspiration from Wednesday through Saturday.
In a measure of the conference's enthusiastic embrace of diversity, the Monterey event ran the gamut from a presentation on how mantis shrimp break open snails to a standing ovation for a piano recital by 14-year-old prodigy Jennifer Lin.
Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn joined in a meditation session guided by a Buddhist monk. And genomics pioneer Craig Ventner discussed his globe-trotting plans for mapping the genome of the planet's population.
Chris Anderson, the curator of the conference, told Reuters the gathering provides a four-day immersion in ideas, invention and fun at a time when many of its high-powered participants are reevaluating life's big-picture questions.
"A lot of people who have been incredibly successful over the years have been compelled to write a different agenda because of a combination of economic issues and 9/11," he said.
Anderson, in his second year as the conference curator, announced the launch of the TED prize, an award that will give $100,000 apiece to three people judged to be remarkable.
The invited guests to this year's conference included the founders of such Internet luminaries as Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, eBay, Google, Intuit, Paypal and Priceline.
William Taubman, a real estate developer, who has attended TED since it started over a decade ago, described it as a kind of vacation for the mind.
In a presentation entitled "Humor, Joy and Surprise in Design," Al Seckel, a neuroscientist from the California Institute of Technology, described illusions as "expectations that have been violated in some unexpected, pleasing way."
That was close to what many people felt upon seeing the billionaire founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, circling the stage on a Segway scooter.
The same audience had earlier watched bonobos, a species of ape from central Africa, learn to draw pictures, drive golf carts and play computer games.
On the whole, TED participants were wildly optimistic about the future, with predictions that scientists in the years just ahead would solve the problem of aging, understand the nature of gravity and find another planet like Earth.
Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, ended the conference by saying that America should look to 15th century Florence for inspiration.
"Florence in the 15th century could have become the greatest military power in Europe with all its wealth and genius, but instead it chose to invest it in beauty," Seligman said.
"This is your Florentine moment and it only comes once in a millennium," he added. "The question we all have to ask ourselves is how are we going to use technology, entertainment and design to increase the tonnage of human happiness on the planet."
With that the conference drew to a close on a rousing coda that included singing and dancing led by the Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard.
It was an attempt to find the "flow" of the moment, described earlier by Nancy Etkoff, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard University.
"People feel happiest when they are in the flow, absorbed, and not figuring out the self," she said.
