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Title

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert

Review

Happiness: that amorphous goal that everyone seems to be pursuing but nobody can quite tell you how to find.  Well, this book isn't a self-help book and doesn't presume to tell you how to find happiness. But it does attempt to tell you how the human race defines and (mis)measures happiness; the many ways we try to predict and achieve it; why we aren't as good at planning and predicting it as we think we should be; why we still somehow manage to be reasonably happy even when our current circumstances are what our previous selves predicted would make us miserable; and how most of us ignore what science demonstrates can be a far more accurate way to predict one's future feelings, thoughts, and level of happiness.

Gilbert is a Harvard psychology professor and a very entertaining yet well-researched writer. He discusses a wide range of scientific experiments and common-sense observations about everything from Phineas Gage's bizarre 1848 brain injury to child development, from the laws of probability to consumer purchasing habits, and in doing so he illustrates the sometimes self-evident but often surprising things scientists have learned about the brain and emotion. Reading his examples, I found plenty of real-life applications, as I found myself recognizing more about my own mental processes ('oh, so that’s why I remember XYZ that way') and being entertained by others' foibles ("that explains why he does that even though it makes no logical sense!").  While I can certainly hope I can be self-aware enough to avoid the more-dangerous mental traps (now that I've achieved such wisdom by reading this book, right?!), Gilbert also highlights how universal – and, often, absolutely essential to normal human functioning – these quirks of human perception and emotion really are.  That fact alone makes this book accessible and applicable to anyone with a frontal lobe behind your eyebrows.

I enjoyed and would recommend this book, especially to readers who enjoy the similarly off-beat science explorations of Mary Roach or the assumption-challenging books of Malcolm Gladwell (who endorsed this book) or Daniel Pink.  Chambers Library has several titles by those authors as well. ~ Naomi Schemm

Review Date

Reviewed April 2013