Have you ever finished a book, then started right in reading it again from the start? Was it so satisfying you couldn't bear to let it end? Or so deep you couldn't understand parts until you read it over again?

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert has both those qualities. Highly entertaining, and, in places, highly dense.

Marty Asher, Gilbert's editor at Knopf writes, "I have now read Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness five times, and each time, around page 20, I start pinching myself. I just can't believe it's as terrific as I think it is."

OK, that's the puffed-up editor talking. He has a huge stake in the success of this book, so of course he's going to praise it. Should we believe him?

That's exactly the kind of ambiguous yet important question Stumbling on Happiness talks about. We spend a lot of time making choices based on an unreliable guess about what may happen in the future.

Gilbert says "We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy..." Most of our choices are bound to be wrong, based on faulty assumptions, or wrong information, or tricks our brains play.

"There is no simple formula for finding happiness," Gilbert says. "But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble."

I just read you the last sentence in the book. After thinking for a minute, I turned again to the first sentence: "What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes?"

How can you NOT like a book that starts with A Big Question yet ends with a delicious sense of humility?

Whatever you might do in those last ten minutes, Gilbert writes, such as "race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration... of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today."

"We take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so THEY can enjoy their retirements on a putting green... in fact, just about any time we want something... we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints... (a) decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.

"Yeah, yeah. Don't hold your breath... (our future selves) (will) wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like THAT," Gilbert says.

We pay attention to "facts" that support our assumptions, and ignore "facts" that do the opposite. We do a lot of silly things like this, and together, these silly things can lead us far astray.

Gilbert reports the City Council of Monza, Italy, "took the unusual step of banning goldfish bowls. They reasoned that goldfish should be kept in rectangular aquariums... because 'a fish kept in a bowl has a distorted view of reality and suffers because of this.'

"The good counselors of Monza did not suggest that human beings should enjoy the same right, perhaps because they knew that our distorted views of reality are not so easily dispelled, or perhaps because they understood that we suffer less with them than we would without them.

"Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous -- that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others... To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion."

Chew on that a couple of minutes while I get out my leaky red pen and a pack of Post-it notes.

At this point I should explain that Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard. His insights and assertions are based on the latest clinical research involving the newspaper headlines, duped college students, helpless fruit flies and drugged-out rats. Gilbert skillfully incorporates this Sunday supplement science to make killer points about perception and reality.

I learned a great deal from this book. Solved several world crises and made better friends with my future self.

I predict you will be happy you read it. And you may even want to read it from the start again.

I did.

Aired Sunday April 9, 2006 at 10:55 am and Monday April 10, 2006 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Alfred A. Knopf, $24 hardcover. ISBN 1400042666. To be published May, 2006.

Gilbert's home page at Harvard, home of the Hedonic Psychiatry Laboratory, whatever that is: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/gilbert.htm