Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert; Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

How to be happy

Daniel Gilbert has written an inspiring book about the search (both personal and scientific) for happiness. The book focuses on the psychological viewpoint, but is to some degree anchored on new results from neuroscience research.

For me the most interesting aspect of the book deals with knowledge. Gilbert is quite convincing in demonstrating difficulties people have in decision-making, especially in comparing things which happen in future. Our brains supply us with memories which are for the most based on illusions. And when we are imagining the future we are being similarly mislaid.

It is quite typical for humans that we are afraid to make decisions. But - paradoxically - we are very much prone to regret our inaction later on. We are greedy, cautions, and prone to regret. Is there a way to overcome our limitations?

Our capabilities are quite limited, and this also affects scientific research and political decision-making. Can human beings make good decisions about, for example, global warming?

Gilbert's book makes some use of the current research in neuroinformatics, but it would be interesting to see how much of the suggestions actually bear out in closer scrutiny. The understanding of how the human brain works is far from complete, but thanks to new neuroimaging and simulation techniques we may be getting new insight quite soon.

Perhaps some day we are able to quantitatively verify some of the theories suggested by Gilbert. And at that point we may also be able to judge how good decisions we are making, and perhaps correct some of the worst ones before regretting them.

Perhaps globalization and especially global networks may help us here. As Gilbert notes, human beings are not very different from each other, so asking someone how it feels to do something is a good way to compare alternatives, much better than trying to imagine the future by ourselves.

But there is a long way towards the day when we know enough to be able to coach human beings towards happiness. And perhaps the future is not so utopian - it may be that the new neuroinformatics discoveries will be first used by marketeers to get people to buy things, not to help us to avoid making wrong decisions.