Inside the throat of a beatboxer

Nate Ball let the TEDMED audience see the inside of his throat Thursday night while he beatboxed. Dr. Quyen Nguyen used an endoscope on stage to give us an up-close-and-personal look at how these sounds are produced inside him.

Ball, an engineer by training, has a keen curiosity about what's going in his body when he beatboxes. He let Dr. Charles Limb, also on stage, look at images of his brain while beatboxing, too, on a different occasion.

Limb saw that Ball's brain has very different patterns of activity when improvising and when spouting out an established beat. Creating a new beat on the fly seems to involve shutting down a portion of the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in self-monitoring, and activating other neural networks; there is increased cerebellum activity in improvisation, for example.

CNN.com is catching up with Ball, Limb and Nguyen on camera. Stay tuned for future pieces on what makes each of their individual projects fascinating.