A Buddhist monk for forty years, Matthieu Ricard is an experienced meditator, frequently requested by universities around the world for his research on the brain.

Neurobiologist, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Wolf Singer is one of the world's leading specialists on the brain.

For eight years, Ricard and Singer have shared their knowledge and wondered about how the mind works: Does meditation modify neural circuits? How are emotions formed? What are the different modified states of consciousness? What is the "I"? Is there free will? What can we say about the nature of consciousness?

In each topic, two traditions of thought are intelligently confronted. One, the Buddhist philosophy, is a first-person knowledge, the result of ancient practices of meditation in the brain. The other, neurosciences, is knowledge in the third person, from laboratory experimentation. The two approaches are radically different, but quite often they reach the same conclusions. In order to develop a true "science of the mind", the approximation between the two approaches is essential. And that is exactly what this work proposes: a deep dialogue between the contemplative and modern sciences with the idea of ​​penetrating the mysteries of the human mind.