Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-13

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Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “Giving Up”

Doty returns to the place Cactus Rabbit Magic Shop had once been only to find it gone. His attempts to track down Neil are likewise unsuccessful. Disappointed, Doty walks past the apartment building where he and his family used to live, questioning what he thought he would accomplish by returning to Lancaster.

Taking out his notes on Ruth’s lessons, Doty considers two phrases he had underlined: “compass of the heart” and “what you think you want isn’t always what’s best for you” (224, 225). He remembers Ruth advising him to use his heart as a guide when setting his intention, and he now realizes that in neglecting to do that, he has consistently pursued the wrong goals.

The next morning, Doty receives a phone call from his lawyer informing him that, due to a clerical error, the Accuray stocks were never placed in a charitable trust. Promising to call back, Doty considers the implications of going back on his promise to donate the stocks and practices opening his heart. He then contacts the lawyer and tells him to finalize the paperwork.

Doty feels an immediate sense of relief and decides to return to his medical practice. Increasingly, he comes to believe that Ruth’s lessons weren’t meant to facilitate “an inward journey alone, but an outward journey of connection as well” (231). In this sense, they are in line with modern medicine, which has found that social relationships are vital to both physical and mental health.

Chapter 11 Summary: “The Alphabet of the Heart”

Rather than returning to his position as a professor at Stanford, Doty goes to Mississippi to help a struggling public hospital become a regional leader in neurosurgery: “After losing my wealth, I was committed to helping others, and this center, serving the needs of the poor, felt in a way like atonement for the years I had spent pursuing wealth and power” (240). He talks, for instance, about the case of a boy who developed a fatal brain abscess from an ear infection; his parents hadn’t been able to afford the treatment their son needed.

After getting the program in Mississippi up and running, Doty—now remarried and father to a young child—chooses to return to Stanford. He plans to research the relationship between the brain and heart, and he soon finds himself connecting with others similarly interested in the effects of empathy and altruism on the brain. While working on this, Doty also develops his own addition to Ruth’s lessons: a list of practices or values that open the heart. This “alphabet of the heart” includes compassion, dignity, equanimity, forgiveness, gratitude, humility, integrity, justice, kindness, and love. Doty incorporates this alphabet into his meditation routine, choosing one quality to reflect on each day.

In this way, Doty learns to open his heart in the way that Ruth tried to teach him to do as a child. He begins to feel a deep sense of connection and shared humanity with those closest to him (his family, his patients, etc.) and with all people: “[E]verywhere I went, I saw people who were just like me. […] Each of them was walking a path. Each of them struggled and suffered at times” (249).

Chapter 12 Summary: “Manifesting Compassion”

Doty recounts the story of one of his first patients: an opera singer named June, who was referred to him when it was discovered that she had an unruptured brain aneurysm. Doty himself enjoys opera, and the two struck up a friendship, with June confiding that she feared losing her ability to sing as a result of having surgery. This personal relationship nearly got the better of Doty during the operation, and he had to pause to collect himself: “It’s deadly for a surgeon to connect with a patient’s humanity during surgery. It has to be a technical exercise.” (256-257). The surgery was successful, and Doty was grateful that he was able to save not only June’s life, but her ability to touch others through music.

June’s story demonstrates the challenges of balancing professionalism and compassion, and it was partly a desire to better strike that balance that led Doty to empathy and altruism as areas of research. Like many animals, humans have an innate drive to help others; for people, doing so actually activates areas of the brain associated with pleasure. Ultimately, however, Doty concludes that he isn’t simply interested in why humans behave altruistically, but rather in how that instinct could be harnessed to make people happier and healthier.

It’s this that leads Doty and a handful of colleagues to form a group they call Project Compassion. The project is small and informal until the group decides to share their work with the Dalai Lama, who has often expressed support for scientific research into practices like meditation. Doty meets with the Dalai Lama to invite him to speak at Stanford, but to Doty’s shock, the Dalai Lama also offers to make a large donation to his research. With this funding, the group secures additional contributions and eventually formalizes their research activities in the form of CCARE. Helping to found this organization is one of the ways Doty has worked to keep his childhood promise to Ruth.

Chapter 13 Summary: “The Face of God”

The “White Coat Ceremony,” where medical students take the Hippocratic Oath, typically also features a speech by a celebrated medical professional. When Doty is asked to give the speech at Tulane University, he takes the responsibility very seriously, and is shocked that he, a “failing undergraduate” has been chosen for such a prestigious event.

While preparing for the address, Doty thinks a great deal about how Ruth’s “magic” has shaped his life, making him both a better doctor and a better person. He ultimately recounts this story to his audience, and then goes on to share his thoughts about the role of love and compassion in both medicine and life:

This path will take you to life’s deepest and darkest valleys [...] [b]ut it will also take you to life’s highest peaks where you will see the meek demonstrate strength you thought not possible, cures for which you can find no explanation, and the power of compassion and kindness to cure human ills. And by doing so you will see the very face of God (273).

The speech moves many in the audience to tears, and as Doty leaves the stage, he’s overwhelmed by feelings of peace and happiness. As the book ends, he expresses his hope that his readers can also learn from, and pass on, Ruth’s magic.

Chapters 10-13 Analysis

In Part 3, Into the Magic Shop comes full circle: a book that begins with its narrator learning meditative techniques ends with him teaching those techniques to others, just as he promised he would. The most dramatic example of this is likely Doty’s work on CCARE: “a pioneer and leader in the field of compassion and altruism research [that] has promoted the profound effect such behaviors can have on the lives of individuals […]” (265). Doty also finds opportunities to pass on Ruth’s teachings in his work training future doctors, which perhaps explains why the book ends with the White Coat Ceremony at Tulane; the speech Doty delivers there touches on most of the same topics the book does, from Doty’s childhood experiences at the magic shop to Doty’s own extension of Ruth’s lessons—the alphabet of the heart.

Of course, Into the Magic Shop is itself a way for Doty to pass on Ruth’s teachings, which makes it all the more notable that he devotes an entire section of the book to just one of her precepts: opening the heart. Although Ruth stressed that this is the most important step, it’s one that Doty struggled to appreciate for much of his life, causing a great deal of suffering for himself and for those around him. Doty therefore chooses to conclude the book not with what Ruth presented as the capstone of her technique—visualization—but with the compassion and altruism necessary to ground that visualization. In doing so, he once again brings his scientific expertise to bear on the subject, explaining both the effects of practicing empathy and the reasons why it’s necessary for the practitioner’s own well-being. Here, for instance, he discusses how a part of the brain called the periaqueductal grey matter encourages and positively reinforces altruistic behavior:

When we see others in pain or suffering, this part of the brain activates, meaning we are wired to nurture and help others when they are in need. Similarly, when we give to others, it lights up the pleasure and reward centers in the brain, even more so than when someone gives to us (260).

This is in effect a scientific explanation for something Ruth tried to impress on Doty as a boy: that because human happiness is so intertwined with social relationships, personal goals that aren’t based in a sense of shared humanity will prove unfulfilling.

This final section of the book is also about the limitations of science when it comes to explaining some of the most meaningful aspects of human existence—a theme that has been implicit throughout the work. There is an inherent paradox at play in any kind of activity that seeks to rewire the brain because it would seem impossible for the brain, as a physical object, to be capable of even thinking about (much less acting on) itself. In other words, the very phenomenon of neuroplasticity throws questions about the nature of consciousness into sharp relief. As Doty notes, the brain is clearly related to the mind (the self that thinks, feels, experiences, etc.) but the exact relationship between the two remains mysterious; as a medical student, he’s knows what parts of the brain control what physical movements, but he never learns “what part of the brain [he] could slice into and watch love spill out” (75). Experiences like Doty’s NDE, as well as the farewell visit from his father, raise further questions about science’s ability to account for the nature of the mind; the materialistic understanding of consciousness as a strictly physical process is clearly at odds with any notion of an afterlife, which these events could be seen as furnishing evidence for.

It’s therefore notable that Doty, despite his atheism, strikes a quasi-spiritual note in the book’s final few chapters, which include passages like this one concerning the connectedness of all things and people: “I know in my deepest being that it is love that is the glue that binds each of us” (248). Likewise, it’s worth remembering that what Doty found most profound and interesting about his near-death experience was the love he felt during it. In this way, Doty leaves open the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension to human consciousness and existence, and that it is deeply connected to what he calls the “heart”: our capacity for love and compassion.