Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart is a work of nonfiction by neurosurgeon and philanthropist Dr. James R. Doty. It is at once a memoir, a self-help book, and a work of popular science; Doty draws on his professional knowledge to explain the scientific underpinnings of meditative practices like visualization, while also exploring the transformative effect these practices can have on people’s lives (his own included). As a result, Into the Magic Shop has garnered praise from both scientific and faith-based quarters. This study guide refers to the 2016 Avery edition of the work.

Doty’s own story begins with an overview of his boyhood in 1960s Lancaster, California—now a suburb of Los Angeles, but at the time, a small town. Doty’s father is an alcoholic who struggles to hold down a job, and his mother suffers from clinical depression; Doty grows up with only precarious access to necessities like food and housing and is often forced to act as a caretaker to his own parents.

At age 12, Doty happens to visit a store called Cactus Rabbit Magic Shop. The shop owner’s mother—a woman named Ruth—takes an interest in Doty’s plight and offers to teach him a series of meditative practices she promises will help him make his dreams a reality. Doty accepts, and over the next several weeks, Ruth teaches him how to relax his body, clear his mind, respond with compassion to himself and to others, and visualize the future he wants for himself. This last technique is by far the most interesting to Doty, and he largely ignores Ruth’s warning about the importance of opening his heart: “You need to open your heart to learn what you want before you use this magic, otherwise if you don’t really know what you want and you get what you think you want, you’re going to end up getting what you don’t want” (99-100).

Doty’s life doesn’t change overnight as a result of Ruth’s teachings, but meditation does provide him with a tool for weathering the turbulence of his home life. Doty’s efforts at visualization prove more powerful than he can fully explain, helping him secure admission to both college and medical school. It’s while training as a doctor that Doty truly begins to thrive; Doty has a natural talent for medicine, in part because the tricks Ruth taught him allow him to focus deeply and remain calm under pressure. Nevertheless, Doty’s life and career are nearly cut short when he and some fellow residents go out partying and end up wrecking their car. Doty almost dies of blood loss, and the experience leaves him with a renewed sense of life’s precariousness and the importance of love and human connection.

This realization fades as Doty grows wealthier and more successful. After bankrolling a friend’s medical technology, Doty’s begins to shift from medicine to investment opportunities; by his mid-forties, he’s worth $75 million and planning to retire when the dot-com bubble bursts, wiping out his fortune overnight.

This loss proves to be a catalyst for self-reflection and change. Gradually, Doty realizes that his wealth had come at the expense of personal relationships; he had spent years ignoring Ruth’s words on the importance of love and compassion. As a result, when presented with the opportunity to reclaim some of his former wealth, Doty gives the money to charity and instead resumes his career in medicine, helping to establish a cutting-edge neurosurgery program at a public hospital in Mississippi. He then goes on to research the effects of altruism and empathy on the brain, eventually establishing a program called the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). As its name suggests, CCARE aims not only to explore the neurology of kindness and love, but to teach others. In founding CCARE, and in writing Into the Magic Shop, Doty has kept a childhood promise he made to Ruth: that he would one day share the “magic” that had transformed his own life with someone else.