As I’ve mentioned in a few of my other posts this year, I get really geeked out about how the brain works. I’ve read a number of books either on the subject or which address the subject starting almost twenty years ago. The first of these was Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. I heartily recommend it to anyone that hasn’t read it.
Most recently I “read” Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Actually I didn’t read it at all, I listened to the audiobook during my very long drive from Texas yesterday. It was a fascinating book. To make a complex thesis as simple as possible, Gilbert asserts that we humans are generally pretty lousy at predicting what will make us happy. He goes to great length to make his point very thoroughly, and along the way describes some psychological studies on related matters which I found to be truly enlightening. Most interesting among them to me were the analyses of how people tend to adopt their circumstances and make themselves happy with whatever they might be, and how people given the opportunity to modify a choice over time are generally less satisfied than people that are allowed to choose once and stick with that choice forever. Also interesting were the degree to which the retrieval of memories actually modifies the memory being retrieved, how thoroughly the frontal lobe is occupied with the business of projecting the future, and how the areas of the brain which are used to process input from the senses are also enlisted to visualize the future.
There is no way I can summarize the book’s nine hour narrative in anything like a reasonably short blog post, but if you want to get the author’s most compact description of his thesis and you have twenty minutes to spare, you could do a lot worse than the video below from last year’s TED conference.
Give it a look. Gilbert was a good narrator of his own book. He is an even better speaker. The story of how he came to be a PhD psychologist is pretty interesting too. It can be found here at Wikipedia.
