"Dr. Myron Rolle--neurosurgery resident, Rhodes Scholar, former NFL player--shares how the strong work ethic, faith, and family values instilled in him by his immigrant parents and older brothers combined with a simple-yet-transformative life philosophy to enable him to overcome adversity, defy expectations, and build a life of meaning and purpose"--

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. With an alcoholic father and a depressed mother Doty's life was at a dead end when, at age twelve, he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb....

"Tumors, injuries, natural malformations -- there is almost no such thing as a non-emergency brain surgery when it comes to kids. For a pediatric neurosurgeon working in the medical minefield of the brain -- in which every millimeter in every direction governs something that makes us essentially human -- every day presents the challenge, the opportunity, to give a new lease on life to a child for whom nothing is yet determined and all possibilities...