Stumbling on Happiness

[My review of the 12min summary]

Daniel Gilbert is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard. He specializes in affective forecasting, which is the brain's ability to predict whether it will be a happy brain or a sad brain in the future.

This is a good book. It describes the ways your brain is incapable of predicting the future and remembering the past. Most people think that their memories are accurate. They're not! Stop believing that crap! Your brain is failing you! It's a bigger disappointment than your no-good son who dropped out of college and now plays video games in your basement.

Final Notes (quoted from 12min) "You are unable to predict the future correctly, or even to remember events accurately. Since the brain needs to economize, it automatically fills in details of past and future experiences, while leaving other details out. It is also incapable of accurately imagining you in a different situation from the one you are in right now.

"The easiest way to overcome these shortcomings of the brain is to listen to the advice of others. Also, when planning for the future, remember that upon looking back, you will regret the things you did not do, while you will learn from any mistakes you made."

This is my second reading. Again, I found the book informative and well written. Again, I felt disappointed by Gilbert's failure to differentiate between kinds of happiness.

Gilbert is a terrific writer: engaging, entertaining, even laugh-out-loud funny at times. The book is well organized, rich with examples of the latest knowledge in psychology, neuroscience, and economics (but don't worry -- he makes it readable without dumbing it down). Without actually labeling them as such, he describes many of our cognitive biases: the tricks our brains play on us, how and why they happen, and why they're so hard for us to see.

The conclusion of the book is simple: if you want to know how happy or unhappy something will make you, don't trust your imagination. Instead, look to and trust the experiences of others who have been there. Getting to that conclusion, convincing the reader of it, really does take the entire book, and it's worth it. I'm disappointed at his lack of discussion of internal vs external rewards, of deep fulfilling happiness vs the shallow potato-chip-yum kind ... but that's another book. Despite that lack, I fervently recommend this book to anyone who wants to know and understand a little bit about ourselves.