Tremendously informative and fun. Gilbert does a great job of guiding us on a tour of our brain – how it deals with what it remembers, what it experiences, and what it fabricates. We learn how those factors combine to influence our ability to predict our future happiness, and with this knowledge, see why our predictions often go astray.

The concepts flow smoothly, in logical progression, and are well-illustrated, with examples of studies performed to derive the theories being discussed.

Oh, and it’s funny – Gilbert’s tossed my idea, formed when reading Freakonomics, that researchers should be paired with professional writers, on its head.

A must-read for those of you who have brains.

This book is a great synthesis of a whole lot of psychological research on human fallacies – errors in deduction, induction, memory, etc., and what it means in terms of how we predict or, more often, mis-predict the future, though the implications of the research are wider than that. Gilbert’s style is breezy and humorous (though some of the jokes are a little asinine) and makes for a clipping read.

His basic premise is that the human imagination has three shortcomings:

• its tendency to fill in some details and omit others, which gives a misleading picture of what the future could be like,
• its tendency to project the present onto the future, so that your present state of mind colours your picture of the future even when it has no real relevance to the situation, and
• its failure to recognise that things will look different once they happen, in particular, that bad things don’t seem so bad when they happen – human beings have a natural resilience they don’t see when imagining bad things happening.

Peppered with interesting facts and anecdotes besides synthesising the academic findings, I thought this was a great book and I very much enjoyed reading it. At least, I remember enjoying reading it – after reading this book, you’ll trust your memory a lot less than you used to. In the last chapter, Gilbert suggests a solution to overcome the shortcomings of the imagination, but as he says, it’s not a very satisfying solution and just about everyone will ignore it anyway. Still, it’s good to just be aware that everything may not be as your brain is telling you and to stop and consider other sides of the situation. Very much recommended.

I began reading this also on the plane to Pittsburgh. The first 20 pages were hilarious. Laugh out loud funny. The rest of the book has been good too, but not as clever, surprising, nor entertaining as the introduction. Which really just goes to prove Gilbert’s point. Read the book to see what I mean.

Continued to read on plane trips to DC, LA, and back to Seattle, but still have another 50 pages or so…