The author relates how a chance encounter in a magic shop with a woman who taught him exercises to ease his sufferings and manifest his greatest desires gave him a glimpse of the relationship between the brain and the heart, and drove him to explore the neuroscience of compassion and altruism.

"Pide tres deseos. Esa es la extrana propuesta que escucha el joven Jim, un chico de doce anos procedente de una familia desestructurada, cuando entra en una tienda de magia del desierto de California. Jim aun no lo sabe, pero esta a punto de descubrir en que consiste la verdadera magia: en utilizar el poder de la mente y del corazon para hacer cosas que superan lo que creiamos posible."--provided by Amazon.com. The author relates how a chance encounter...

At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the...

"Near-death experiences are controversial. Thousands of people have had them, but many in the scientific community have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those people. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that what people of faith call the "soul" is really a product of brain chemistry. NDEs, he would have been the first to explain, might feel real, but they are fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress....