10 brains you will love

Don’t miss this opportunity: great Brazilian artists, journalists, scientists, businessmen and philosophers speak their minds in the new TED conference series produced in São Paulo.

Some highlights (for the versions with English subtitles, click on their names and make sure the CC button, that turns on the captions, is on):

1. Regina Casé is the comedian who founded  Asdrúbal Trouxe o Trombone troupe in the seventies, then gave life to memorable characters of the comedy show TV Pirata, in the eighties. In 1989, she met researcher Hermano Vianna and this led to a turning point in her career. Together, they created a group of studies and professional partnerships that caused her to shift the focus of her work from art to anthropology. This partnership gave way to Brazil Legal, Muvuca, and Central da Periferia, among other projects that bring to the little screen the realities of the country.
2. Fabio Barbosa, president of the Santander Group Brazil and my former boss, one of the leaders of the debate about corporate responsibility and sustainability in the country. A brilliant man with a very advanced vision.  Since 2000, he developed a strategy at Banco Real (that now belongs to Santander) that includes offering lines of credit for companies that wish to comply with environmental standards and cutting companies that harm the environment off its client list (I was part of the team in charge of these cuts). The plan became the object of a study at Harvard University.
3. Valério Dornelles has invented a new way to build walls – and his inspiration came from seeing his 7 years old son play with Lego. Created in 2000, his new construction system was based on building blocks of different sizes, which fit together. This reduces the time for raising the walls by half and prevents the waste of materials.
4. Flavio Deslandes is a designer from Rio de Janeiro living in Denmark. He has developed more than ten different types of bikes using hand-picked, hand-cut Brazilian bamboo. Over the years, Deslandes has developed special machinery, tools and procedures for working with bamboo.
5. Psychologist Antônio Veiga discusses the transpersonal therapy method (TRT), based on his own technique of memory regression. His study involves detailed survey of psychic possibilities of human beings through different states or degrees of consciousness.
6. Guti Fraga is the creator of project Nós do Morro – a theater company with young residents of the Vidigal slum, in Rio. Every Brazilian movie or TV soap opera today features actors who were in Nós do Morro, including Jonathan Haagensen, one of the 35 members who were in the Oscar nominated motion picture City of God (2002).
7. Osvaldo Stella is a Mechanical Engineer with a Ph.D. in Ecology and a Project Coordinator of the Climate Change Program of IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia). As an active environmentalist, he is in charge of several research projects focused on Energy Planning and Climate Change. One of these is a pilot project at the Sewage Treatment Plant in Barueri (state of São Paulo), which studies the generation of electricity from sewage treatment-generated biogas.
8. Augusto de Franco is a writer, consultant and one of netweavers at Escola-de-Redes, a network of people dedicated to researching social networks and creating and sharing netweaving technologies.
9. Roberta Faria is a journalist and the co-founder of Editora MOL, that publishes Sorria magazine, first released in 2008,  that defies market rules and editorial models.
10. Finally, you should also check Vik Muniz – a talented artist that experiments with different media and was recently portrayed in a post here – in the American TED series.