★Unlock the complete map of the brain's nine cognitive pillars, from memory and emotion to consciousness. More than just explaining the secrets of memory and learning, this book guides you to explore the neural foundations of language, aesthetics, personality, and even free will.
★The author is not only a medical professor and researcher but also a practitioner in the fight against poverty. This dual perspective ensures that even while dissecting hardcore science like intelligence and consciousness, the book remains filled with a profound and warm understanding of “humanity.”
★It avoids jargon and goes straight to the core: How do we remember and forget? What is the brain busy doing while we sleep? Where does our sense of beauty come from? Open it and begin a systematic upgrade to understanding yourself from the inside out.

Brain, it's nothing out of this world, just a one-and-a-half-kilogram organ protected by a bone in our head. But it handles everything, from blinking or preventing the heart from stopping, to writing complex texts on ethics, physics, or philosophy. We've lived with it our entire lives, and yet, do we understand it?
Knowing the nearly one hundred billion neurons that make our brain function is impossible, but we can begin to unravel some of its mysteries, such as: the process by which we have short and long-term memory, how we learn, what happens when we sleep and what it's for, how the brain intervenes in our emotional world, why we have empathy, how we communicate and how the brain processes language, what our sense of beauty is, what intelligence really is, and what role consciousness plays.

Throughout the nine chapters of this book, the major cognitive milestones of the brain are explained, starting with memory. Remembering is a fundamental activity we use daily that enables our survival, just like learning—a process that harnesses the brain's neuronal plasticity to evolve. The third chapter, dedicated to sleep, is related to the other two, as it is during sleep that we consolidate memory and learning.
However, the brain does not have just three pillars. On the contrary, this organ is responsible for managing everything that truly makes us human: emotions, personality, language, aesthetics… We cannot live without feeling, without communicating, without enjoying beauty, without simply being who we are.
Among the many concepts encompassed by neuroscience, perhaps two raise all sorts of questions: what is intelligence and how is it measured, and how complex is our consciousness as individual, ethical, and, above all, free human beings.

Janez Faxviníxix Ruso
He holds a Doctorate in Health Sciences and a Master's in Experimental Biomedicine from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, as well as a Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Córdoba. He has been a professor and tutor at the Faculty of Medicine in Ciudad Real, also supervising Bachelor's theses. He is a prominent science communicator who has participated in conferences and congresses, and is the editor of the blog Ciencia, no ficción (Science, Not Fiction).
As a science writer, he has contributed to the multi-author collaborative work Neuroacción. La neurociencia aplicada a las Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte (Neuroaction: Neuroscience Applied to Physical Activity and Sport Sciences), and with Libsa publishing house. In addition to this book, he has authored the children's science manual titled Explora tu cerebro (Explore Your Brain).
Alongside, or perhaps not so separate from, his academic activities, he collaborates with various NGOs fighting poverty in pursuit of a more just world and gives awareness-raising talks about malaria in schools and high schools, convinced that scientific knowledge will make us better people.