Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, isn’t the self-help book it sounds like, although there are a few tips you could pick up from it that would probably make your step a little springier. It’s primarily a book about how the mind works, a topic that always interests my own mind, narcissistic neocortex that it is.

The book is well-researched, seething with footnotes to various supporting studies and papers, and yet the book is a smooth and entertaining read; I definitely recommend it. Gilbert’s main point is that just as we are susceptible to optical illusions, we are also susceptible to what you might call forecasting illusions, or breakdowns of our faculty of imagination.

It’s a good analogy. Our visual cortex is extremely fast: we glance at a scene and see it almost at once, in 3-D glory, with full color, texture, and motion. In exchange for that power at that speed, there are some permanent flaws we live with, sometimes seeing things that are not there, or not possible. Gilbert points out that our faculty of imagination is similarly powerful and fast when it comes to imagining futures, and likewise has deep and permanent flaws. We daily use our imaginations to try to steer our lives in the direction of happiness, but these persistent illusions mean that we often end up getting things we don’t want or vice versa.

Some of these illusions are: remembering only how something ended and not how it went; believing ourselves to be unique and thus exempted from the benefit of others’ experience; interference of our present emotions on our imagination of our future emotions; and (especially) inability to predict the action of our “psychological immune system”.

This book reminds me of Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate, using relatively recent discoveries in neuroscience and psychology to examine philosophy. There is such a thing as human nature; we are at the mercy of our of mental organs. Both books left me with less optimism about human perfectibility, but in exchange, a renewed and valuable sense of humility.