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Watch Quyen Nguyen’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Watch Charles Limb’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

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At the TEDMED conference, TED’s own Nafissa caught up with writer AJ Jacobs, whose TEDTalk describes his “year of living biblically” …

What are the new projects you’ve been working on since your latest TEDtalk?

I just finished my book Drop Dead Healthy, about my quest to be the healthiest person alive. Also continuing to write for Esquire magazine. I recently wrote an article about one of my misadventures in Hollywood.

What are the challenges of living healthy? Would you like to continue with this healthy lifestyle even after you finish your project and publish your book?

One of the biggest challenges is finding time to fit in all the healthy activities you’re supposed to do. If you follow all the experts’ advice, it’s a 24-hour-a-day job. You have to exercise, prepare meals of whole foods, chew each bite 30 times, meditate, pet dogs (lowers the blood pressure), have sex (good for preventing heart disease), stretch, wash your hands thoroughly, floss, put on sunscreen (a shot glassful every four hours), nap (good for brain and heart) and on and on.

I’m not keeping all of my healthy habits, but I’m definitely keeping a whole bunch. For instance, I now try to move more. I walk, I climb stairs. I write and send emails at my treadmill desk. In fact, I find it hard to work at a regular desk nowadays.

Do you like a different person/different writer because you feel different? more healthy? :)

I’m definitely healthier. I lost 20 pounds. My wife no longer asks if I’m pregnant, which is nice. I’m also fitter (though admittedly, that’s not saying a lot, since I used to get out of breath while putting away the groceries).

Can you reveal what’s your next project to be?

I actually haven’t decided yet. A lot of readers suggest that I do all the positions in the Kama Sutra. But that won’t happen for a whole variety of reasons, including my wife and my back. So stay tuned.

Yesterday at TEDMED, TEDTalks favorite Paul Stamets gave an emotional talk about new medical uses for mushrooms — including a variety that, he says, helped treat his mother’s cancer. Stamets spoke about powerful medical uses for mushrooms and their extracts, from anti-tuberculosis effects (Agarikon) to Cordyceps, a treasure trove of potential medicines, such as cyclosporine, which prevents organ rejection in transplant patients, and the recently FDA-approved drug Gilenya, from Novartis, for treating multiple sclerosis (MS). He can even use mushroom compounds to steer the migration of insects across the landscapes and control diseases carried by insects and animals. The most heartfelt moment of his talk, though, was when he brought his mother to the stage and told how he was able to help her to go from stage 4 breast cancer to tumor-free.

Afterward,TEDBlog sat with Paul and his mother and asked for more of the story.

Paul, you talked about treating your mother who had stage 4 breast cancer with mushrooms. Could you tell us your personal story behind that?

Being able to help your parent is a great feeling. They gave life to me, and as the youngest child, being able to help one of them feels good. I could have helped my father too, years ago, but it didn’t happen. He was terminally ill, and in a coma at that point, and we were standing in the circle of doctors. I brought all the references, and they said: If you want to give this to your dad, we’ll give it to him through his feeding tube. We had a meeting with my brother and sisters, and they all said, Yes, we agree; let him try. But my father had remarried, and my stepmom said no. It was like: “I am coming back to rescue my dad, I can do this!” I had all the mushrooms with me and the references, and the doctors had been convinced. But my stepmother had the right to stop it. And I felt tremendously defeated, and it brought me sorrow for a long time.

When my mother ended up having cancer, I could do something, and I could help. It was like a balance; I could help one of them, you know. That makes me feel very good. And my family feels good. My mother had stage 4 breast cancer and now she is tumor-free.

What mushrooms did you use? and how do they work?

In my mother’s case, I used Turkey Tail mushroom (Trametes versicolor) [in combination with conventional medicines, including taxol and herceptin]. The Turkey Tail product we make is available at Whole Foods under the Host Defense label. Their use supports immunity.

I saw the picture of me and my mother standing on stage later on, and it still brings tears to my eyes.

Having been on the TED stage, it’s like introductions precede you. People know about you before meeting you in a way I have not experienced before. People say, “I’ve seen your TEDTlk!” Oh, OK then, I don’t have to introduce myself! People already know answers to the first questions, so that we can move right on to the important things that we want to talk about.

What have you been doing since your first TEDTalk? What’s new?

My 2009 TEDTalk on surgery was primarily about abdominal surgery and making it better. Since then, we have been going from hair follicles to toenails, looking at all the different places in the body where we can bring robotic surgery. It is a really interesting and fun thought process, and it led to my current thinking, which is what I tried to articulate in my TEDMED talk yesterday: Places where we are looking for a gap between what we can do currently with our existing technologies and what we’d like to be able to do for the patients IF ONLY — if only we had better diagnostic tools, if only we had better therapeutics, better drugs. Putting everything into that framework allows you to really make a decision on where technology like robotics could make a real difference in patients’ lives.

You were an engineer for a while and then you went to medical school — was it a complete change? And are you looking forward to moving on and taking the next stage, and if so what is it?

I would actually not say that it was so much of a complete change, because I took my engineering knowledge with me to med school, and I applied it. One of the things I talked about in my TEDMED talk yesterday was how experts gather a lot of expertise and they get a worldview that is very, very good at filtering between what they do and what they see as irrelevant. And once you’ve build up that filter for a while, you also get very good at filtering out disruptive technologies, things that don’t currently fit the way you think treatment should happen. Thinking about that, eventually I will be stale in what I am doing. I will be too highly trained to be able to be responsive to new things that will happen. So I will need to retrain in some way. I don’t know what it will be. I still feel like I am on a steep part of a learning curve, and you know, in medicine, there is always more to learn.

What’s happening with your green house, which you gave a TED U talk about?

We moved in! We’re doing a lot of stuff in permaculture and landscape gardening, and finally had our rainwater caching system, and the greywater wetlands, so everything is up and running. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now; at a year, I am going to analyze all the data on the house for the first year, and I’ll update the blog at that point with: ‘Well, I had these assumptions on what the house was going to be like, and what is it now compared to the assumptions.’ It will be really interesting to do analysis after a year and project what the house is going to be like. Will I get the payback that I calculated in my talk?
One of the interesting things for me is, I saw all kinds of projections and analysis, but nobody ever closed the loop and actually said how much did it really save you compared to what you had estimated.

How does it feel to live in that house? :)

It’s lovely. It certainly has something to do with sustainability and the feel-good aspect of it. And it is the space we’ve created for our family and it is designed the way we like to live.

The TED team is eagerly watching our content partner conference, TEDMED, happening now in California. (Look for TEDMED video fresh from stage in the coming weeks!) TED’s own Nafissa, is reporting from the conference; this morning, she caught a few minutes with TEDTalks favorite Charles Limb, who studies what creativity looks like in the brains of jazz improvisers and freestyle rappers …

What have you been up to since your talk (from TEDxMidAtlantic) went onto TED.com?

Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time acquiring more data on two main lines of experimental inquiry. The first is the neural mechanisms that underlie spontaneous creativity in musicians, and the second is the study of how deaf individuals who receive cochlear implants perceive music. Both of these areas of inquiry are deeply compelling to me. In terms of specific followup, we have completed functional brain image acquisition on jazz musicians who are having musical “conversations,” showing that traditional language areas of the brain are critical for this type of activity. Also, we have finished brain studies of freestyle rappers who are improvising, which will add further crucial insights into the neurobiology of creativity. We are now actively working on manuscript preparation in hopes to publish these exciting studies.

What are the projects you are currently working on that you’d like to share with the TED.com community

I am currently trying to work on a few studies — one is to see how mechanisms of creativity in jazz or rap generalize to other forms of spontaneous improvisation, such as in drawing. We are also trying to examine how these mechanisms differ in amateur vs. expert musicians, and children vs. adults. It is probably fairer to say that I am trying to work on getting funding for these studies, since they are in the conceptual stages at this point …”

What are your five favorite records?

My five favorite records? Tough question! How about five of my favorite pieces or songs:

1. Gustav Mahler, “Ich Bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen” (recording with Janet Baker)
2. Astor Piazzolla, “Milonga del Angel” (from Tango: Zero Hour)
3. John Coltrane, “Lush Life” (with Donald Byrd on trumpet, no vocals; from album of the same title)
4. Miles Davis, “In Your Own Sweet Way” (with John Coltrane on saxophone)
5. Prince, “Adore” (from Sign o’ the Times)

Watch Danny Hillis’ talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.

Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Andriankoto asks:

What features, strategies, or marketing would help Internet-based companies in Africa better integrate with international markets?

Click here to respond!

Tell us about the different projects you’re working on.

I help run two NGOs, and I’m working on a social enterprise e-commerce project.

The first NGO is Foko, which means “tribe” in the Malagasy language. It’s the first project I started when I came back to Madagascar in 2007. Foko teaches people here in Antananarivo how to blog. When we started, there were few bloggers, but we had 500 bloggers by 2009, which was very important for Madagascar that year. When we had political trouble here in 2009, our bloggers brought the information to the international community. Our journalists didn’t have a good presence on the Internet. Foko showed the international community exactly what was happening in Madagascar. That was a really important thing.

Now Foko is moving from these political things to issues about improving people’s lives. Foko bloggers write about the environment, health care, women’s empowerment, and other things. The 2009 political situation brought poverty and many people lost jobs. Now we have to focus on how people can improve their lives, under the new crazy politicians in Madagascar.

Vakanala, which means “Pearls of Forest” in Malagasy, is my other NGO. It’s a product of all my experience from my studies, blogging, and everything I care most about. This is my main baby, Vakanala. With Vakanala we are helping one village in the south of Madagascar, offering professional environmental experience. The village asked us to come to protect their forest. So the pilot site is there in the Manambolo Forests. Our ultimate goal is to implement a new, sustainable economic paradigm in the area.

Vakanala does fundraising to sponsor tree planting. We are going to provide seeds to people, the people help the seeds grow, and we help the people to bring the product to the market. So that’s the economic vision for Vakanala. Over 2,500 trees have already been sponsored, but the money is not enough yet to really start the project. This will eventually be a really good forest management and economic improvement project.

Megaseeds is Vakanala’s big e-commerce window. Megaseeds and Vakanala are based on the same concept: promoting environmentally and economically sustainable agriculture. The difference is, we are looking for investors for Megaseeds, and we are looking for funders for Vakanala. Unfortunately, we are having trouble establishing a good electronic payment system for Megaseeds. We are still waiting to launch because of this payment problem.

How will these plants and trees provide for people’s livelihoods?

There is a tree named Ravintsara (Cinnamomum camphora). It’s endemic to Madagascar, meaning it exists only on the island. And we make essential oil from its leaves. We just take the leaves and steam them, without cutting the trees. One drop of essential oil from this tree is worth one dollar. Ravintsara is great for reducing pain and headaches. It’s excellent for colds and the flu, because it is a decongestant, helping to clear the sinuses, is an anti-inflammatory, and more. We are planting it so we can make Madagascar rich, and people can make a living while we are saving the environment. That’s why we chose this special tree. It’s an evergreen that can be planted all over the country, and it’s only in Madagascar. It’s like a monopoly that God gave to the country.
In Madagascar there are 1,300 species of plants that exist only in the country. This is just one plant that can show people that we can fight poverty just by planting trees.
At the beginning, the idea was just to grow endemic species of plants of Madagascar, make some essential oils from the plants, and then sell the essential oil. That’s the original business plan of it, the commerce we want to start this year.

But for the last three years we have also been planting trees for other environmental issues. Now some of the trees are ready. Now the farmers have many products — different even than the one that we had planned. So I’m trying to find a commercial venue for the products, to improve the living of the farmers that are working with us.

The problem of conservation in Madagascar is that the people need a way to earn money, to improve their life. There is a very precious wood, rosewood, in Madagascar, that has no legal protection in the country. The rich countries come to Madagascar and they buy all the timber, especially rosewood. Many people in Madagascar are very poor, and this is an easy way to make money. They cut down these trees, which are very, very old, and very precious for the country and to the environment.

So the issue of conservation is a part of fighting poverty. That’s why we’re doing this.

You started all of these projects after becoming a TED Fellow in 2007. Tell us about your life before that.

I was born in Madagascar and I went to do my studies in France. I lived there for 12 years, and got my major in communications at the university in France.

Before 2007, I was a blogger showing Madagascar’s beauty and asking people to take interest in the beautiful country of Madagascar. I have been working my whole life on communicating what you can find here. Because Madagascar is not only that movie with the lion and the zebra. [Laughs] We also have beautiful people here and we have a culture. We have so many things that many people don’t know.

I blog less now because of microblogging — because of Facebook and Twitter. Also, I do journalism more — I’m a stringer for France 24 and Global Voices as well. Because I’m in the field, they call me and ask me for the news, what’s happening in Madagascar. I don’t work for them every day, but when there are elections, a coup, or something bad happening in Africa — especially in Madagascar — they call me.
But I am really focusing on my projects, and sometimes I write about the projects when I have the opportunity. I hope to get back to blogging when we have a good situation where I have good funding for our project, and we can make a living with our project.

How did the TED Fellowship impact your life?

TED Africa changed my mind about the opportunity you can find here. That was a very, very important conference that changed my life. Even though I wasn’t planning to go back to Madagascar initially, after TEDGlobal Africa, I just took my bag and came back here.

When I arrived here, I started to work with an NGO, helping them as a communications officer. And then from there I started my own NGO and doing all my other stuff.

Being a TED Fellow really changed my life. I think it’s more important than a diploma. It’s easier, as a TED Fellow, to walk in an office or ask for help or for jobs. As a TED Fellow, you take more risks, because you have the network backing you. It’s different when someone’s a TED Fellow.

I’ve taken on a lot of things since becoming a TED Fellow, but now, after three years, I know that I have to concentrate on just one or two things and succeed in doing them. I have a lot of focused energy, but just one person can’t do everything.

But there is also another project that I am really involved in. [Laughs] It’s not my project. It’s the 11/11/11 project, and I think it is very important.

What’s the 11/11/11 project?
Danielle Lauren, from Australia, wants people from all over the world, in every country, to contribute music, video, and photography on November 11, 2011 for a time capsule. 11/11/11 happens on the calendar only every hundred years. It’s a global narrative project. I want to help her put Madagascar on the map. Small countries like ours are not often invited to that kind of project. This year is special for this event and I want to ask people to participate because this only happens every hundred years.

I want to put some Malagasy smiles in this time capsule, and tell the next generation about the beauty of the island before it’s gone. I want to leave some good pictures of the country for children to see what Madagascar at 11/11/11 looked like.

There’s a quote from John Fitzgerald Kennedy that’s very important to me. “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” The political situation in Madagascar is really hard. Who knows what it will look like in another hundred years? Ideas can help sustain communities, though. Ideas are very important for a community – that’s why I like being a part of TED.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

The advice is to keep believing in your idea. Because it’s not easy for an idea to emerge from all the ideas we have around the world. So you have to believe and always prove that your idea is worth spreading. That is simple advice, but I think believing and working hard on your idea is the main thing.

I shouldn’t really give advice, because I haven’t really succeeded yet at what I’m doing. But I think believing is really important.

You’ve certainly had a lot of success with one of your projects: TEDxAntananarivo.

Yes, TEDxAntananarivo is really moving now. We just finished one in November, with an environmental focus. We are doing TEDxAntananarivo as an annual event. It’s become an important part of my calendar. We have many, many people that want to sponsor the event for this year, so we are planning two TEDx’s.

The first one will be in May, and we want to focus on medical issues. We want it to be like TEDMed, and we are looking for speakers or sponsors. We have signed a partnership with a foundation called Akbaraly, based in Madagascar, working to fight cancer in women in Africa.

Madagascar has a lot of medicinal plants that the outside world hasn’t focused on much yet. We have so many of them! So we want to highlight those plants and the people who are working or doing research in this field at our TED event. It should be a very special TEDx.
The second TEDx will be TEDxYouth, in November. Many people here — young and old — are asking me to bring TED to Madagascar, and they are really excited.

I’m the first ever and the only TED Fellow from Madagascar — and want this chance to benefit the country.
TEDxAntananarivo has been very successful, though I’ve been working hard on most of my other projects for three years, without any really important success. But I think they are finally really close to being ready in this year, 2011. That’s my hope. One by one, I hope to bring each project to success and to share that success with TEDsters and people who are working with me.

In his TEDTalk (watch now), Charles Limb reviews his groundbreaking work studying creativity and the brain — by putting musicians inside an fMRI and watching as they improvise. For the past decade, he’s been working with jazz piano players, revealing astonishing new data about the way the brain creates art. And his research has recently branched into a new genre: hip-hop. He spoke to the TED Blog about his new study, and about his day job …

How did you decide to study hip-hop?

It kind of happened very naturally. I’m not somebody who’s listened to a ton of hip-hop; I was much more of a jazz guy, and I listened to a lot of classical music. But I work in Baltimore, grew up around New York and went to medical school in New Haven, and I always did feel that hip-hop is very much a street music, from the people, a grassroots kind of music exactly the same as jazz once was, a kind of iconoclastic music. In some ways, rap has replaced or assumed a lot of the same sociological functions to urban youth. There are a lot of interesting musical parallels between hip-hop and jazz: the rhythmic emphasis, the improvisation, the fact that the musicians are often formally untrained yet they’re incredible. The more I started thinking about jazz and the brain, rap seemed like a natural transition.

There’s never been a scientific study of hip-hop ever. It’s not the kind of topic that I can glean much from other studies or the existing scientific literature.

And I have to tell you, I’ve been having a ton of fun with this study, just experientially. When we were making our beats and our stimuli, trying to design the study, there’s no way to do this study without trying to rap yourself. It really transforms the lab!

Do you see a significant difference in brains between wordless music like jazz and music with words?

Well, I have to be careful, because we’re not done with the study yet. We’re still trying to recruit more rappers …

How are you recruiting rappers for the new study?

I have been slowly infiltrating the Baltimore hip-hop scene. There’s a well-known beatboxer named Shodekeh — he’s performed with the Baltimore Symphony — he and I got to know each other at a symposium at the Visionary Art Museum and we got to talking. I actually told him, “I’m thinking of doing a laryngeal study of beatboxing.” He connected me to one rapper, and just through word-of-mouth, I’ve been getting slowly connected with the scene. I’ve talked now with about 12 professional freestyle rappers, and we’ve studied about half of them.

Given the image Johns Hopkins has as this conservative medical establishment, in an inner city but not of it — the idea that there’s a lab that wants to study hip-hop, I think there’s something appealing to the community.

And I have to tell you how appreciative the musicians are. They really have a vested interest in seeing this research succeed. Because they have thought all along that what they’re doing is important. And they themselves have wondered all along: “Wow, how am I doing this?” They enter an altered state. And what they’re generating off the cuff is just remarkable. They are fascinated by understanding how they do what they do.

Actually, A Class said an interesting thing to me. We were finishing a study, and I asked him in a post-study interview, “Is there any last thing you want to say?” And he turned real serious and he said, “Hip-hop has a bad reputation. Just give us a chance. We’re really good people and we have a lot to say.”

As for other subjects, I would love it if we could get some really well-known freestyle rappers. If Eminem wants to be part of this study, I’d fly him over!

Why do you think your studies have captivated people they way they have?

Previously, there wasn’t a methodology for a study like this. Functional brain imaging is relatively new. When I started my first jazz study, the one in 2003, there was not a single other study I could compare with at the time, there was nothing. It’s one of those topics that will continue to develop.

Although I didn’t get the chance to discuss this during the TEDx talk, functional MRI is only one tool that we can use to study the brain, and like any other method, it has its advantages and disadvantages. By no means do I think that fMRI will reveal everything there is to know about how creativity takes place in the brain, but it is on the other hand a great place to start.

When I did my first jazz study, I really just did it for myself. I just wanted to know. I wasn’t trying to be a scientific innovator, I wasn’t really trying to make a point. It didn’t really matter to me what people thought of the results. So when it was published and the study received a startling amount of attention — I realized that more people wanted to know what I wanted to know. The topic of this research cuts across a wide range of fields, which is unusual for science.

It’s also important to emphasize that the lab and improvisation are not natural bedfellows, and that it’s hard to study music in a way that musicians find comfortable and realistic. In the end, I’m trying to perform modest scientific experiments on a big topic, rather than coax out artistic masterpieces from the researchers, although I’d love to study that one day as well! As a lifelong musician, I’m fully aware of all of the ideas, training, time, effort, and concentration that goes into a genuine creative act, and I try to be very careful and respectful of the arts in the science that I do. I hope this is something that artists will realize, because I think it’s important and difficult. This work is extremely easy to criticize, yet I think that some of the critics may miss this very basic premise on which I’m basing all of my work.

One of the biggest problems is that this type of research is difficult to fund. It’s not the kind of area that a lot of scientists are exploring. By nature, scientists are often less forward-thinking than artists — it’s a conservative field. And in this current funding climate, it’s not going to be easy to get funding to study creativity. It’s not disease-based. And obviously every time you’re funding something, you’re not funding something else. So there’s not a lot of support for this kind of research.

The idea that there is a “crisis in creativity” is in vogue right now, in conversations throughout the country about the failures of education in America. I suspect that what will happen is, a small group of researchers will take on these challenges from a wide range of disciplines. Many of the scientists that study these topics are really part-artist, internally. On one level, I personally care more about music than about science. I view it from the same lens as an artist would. And I think this is why my research may resonate with people. They see some artistic truth in it.

How has this project deepened your own enjoyment of music — or do you go home at night going, I am never going to listen to piano jazz ever again?

No, no, never. It’s funny you should ask, actually — we write our own music in the lab when we do a jazz study, so that the piece is nothing the subjects have heard before, and there are no previous associations. When we’re writing the piece to be memorized, I know that we (in the lab) are going to hear the piece literally hundreds of times. So I tell the lab members that whatever you write, make sure you can listen to it ad nauseam, over and over. And we actually have written some things that are catchy! In fact, I think that one of the jazz musicians played a research melody at one of his gigs. It kind of stuck in his head.

There are people who think art is going to be threatened by this type of analysis, but — no way. There’s so much complexity in music. And when I listen to music, I still listen like a musician. I can get cerebral, take a more analytical approach to music, but the emotional impact or significance of music — my enjoyment of it has in no way changed. In fact, it has grown. Like every subject, you fall in love with it the more deeply you study it.

But the first time I told my wife, I’m going to study jazz using functional brain imaging, she said, “You’re going to do what?” Of all the impractical things that you could do for your career. I trained my whole life to become a surgeon …

Your surgery career has some interesting, kind of poetic crossover with this work.

I’m an auditory surgeon, and I specialize in a surgery called cochlear implantation. I also treat all disorders of the ear, from chronic infections to cancer of the temporal bone. Cochlear implantation is a way to help deaf people hear again, and I study how people who are deaf and receive cochlear implants hear music. The summary is that they hear it really poorly. Pitch perception is horrible, timbre perception is horrible. We’re trying to understand why music perception is so poor and figure out how to make it better.

I’ve been really lucky. I’m studying something I’m fully obsessed with on a personal level. When I go to the lab, I literally cannot imagine anything I’d rather study than music. It’s exactly where I want to be. I’m thinking about the things I would think about on vacation. I know I am extremely lucky. And I don’t take it for granted.

UPDATE: We caught up with Charles Limb at TEDMED 2011 and asked him for an update on all his projects … and his top 5 songs of all time >>