One thing we know about happiness is that it comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes including, for me, this wonderful book. It does its best to hide its scientific credentials beneath a spray of kindergarten colours, and enjoys the kind of garish design more usually seen on the pop psychology and self-help shelves of bookshops. That might have put me off, if Daniel Gilbert had not already come highly recommended, by no less a figure than fellow psychologist Daniel Kahneman. (Gilbert returns the compliment on the jacket of Thinking, Fast and Slow, describing it as a "masterpiece".) Both are fascinated by how our minds work - or don't, as the case may be - hence the "stumbling" part of the title. The pursuit of happiness is no simple jaunt along a primrose path of sensuous indulgence. Whatever route we take, we cannot avoid the sometimes rocky road of cognition, designed by millions of years of evolution to improve our chances of survival but not necessarily to make us happy.

Some of the illusory boulders we regularly trip over include being made less happy by variety, not more, stopping loving new things soon after we buy them, and discovering that money really doesn't buy happiness. We all know this last one, of course, don't we? Once we've earned as much money as we can actually enjoy, we'll quit working and enjoy it, right? Wrong. For Gilbert, money is implicated in some dodgy cultural wisdom about happiness (it "looks suspiciously like a super-replicating false belief"). "In short, the production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth."

So, the activities to which we devote most of our waking hours - shopping for shiny things, working to earn spondulits, getting through that list of fifty things to do before we die - may not bring about the one thing we all want from them: happiness. On the plus side, "most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma" - if you're paralysed in a car accident, after a while life won't be all that bad. We have a kind of "psychological immune system" that defends the mind against unhappiness, only we tend to ignore its power: when volunteers in an experiment were asked "to predict their emotional reactions to rejection, they imagined its sharp sting. Period. They did not go on to imagine how their brains might try to relieve that sting."

There's a pattern emerging. When it comes to happiness, it's not only the objective events that matter, but what we make of them. This is why our remarkable ability to imagine - "to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be" - is the key to understanding happiness. Being "the only animal that thinks about the future" is fantastic, but how good are we? Again, we're back on that rocky road, stumbling on happiness, and this book charts just how well the human brain "can predict which of those futures it will enjoy".

Happiness seems such a highly variable and personal emotion that science ought to have little to say about it, and introducing the imagination is hardly going to make things easier. However, Gilbert begins by recalling his childhood fascination with optical illusions, which are scientifically interesting because everyone makes the same mistake and the mistakes are compelling, even when you're aware you're making them. "The errors that optical illusions induce in our perceptions are lawful, regular and systematic. They are not dumb mistakes but smart mistakes - mistakes that allow those who understand them to glimpse the elegant design and inner workings of the visual system."

We make similar kinds of systematic error when "we fail to recognize that our future selves won't see the world the way we see it now" and we compound that error with our "inability to take the perspective of the person to whom the rest of our lives will happen". That things close up seem clearer is obvious; that this also happens in time as well as space less so, when it's not our eyes but our imaginations that are doing the looking. Then, "the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes".

While people can be wrong about what they are feeling, what we can say is that all claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view - "from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience". There is no view from nowhere.

In "Stumbling on Happiness" Daniel Gilbert guides us through some of the latest scientific research in psychology as well as drawing upon the history of ideas and our understanding of the nature of science. He has written elsewhere about tracing his own theory of belief to the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and here he suggests that "Bernoulli's brilliance lay not in his mathematics but in his psychology" - in his realization that what we objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience. "The sad fact is that converting wealth to utility - that is, predicting how we will feel from knowledge of what we will get - isn't very much like converting metres to yards... The simple, lawful relationships that bind numbers to numbers and words to words do not bind objective events to emotional experiences."

Unsurprisingly, there is no simple formula for finding happiness. In a universe like ours, perhaps we should be grateful to find any kind of happiness at all. Gilbert concludes that, "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".

The central thesis of this book is that we are unable to accurately imagine the future because we don't model important details accurately. Instead our minds tend to confabulate based on our current internal states. A more reliable method is simply to ask someone who is currently doing what we intend to do, as human experience is much more common than individuals like to believe. The rest of the book is about building a water tight proof of this thesis based on peer-reviewed studies. I found the evidence compelling (and now you don't need to read the book to know the conclusion).

The writing is snappy and often very funny, but for me I was hoping for a final chapter outlining those things that people report are actually making them happy compared with commonly held beliefs about what might (and indeed some untangling of those things/states/activities people believe are making them happy and what is actually doing it).

I selected this book on the strength of it having won the Royal Society prize,but found that it lacked a certain academic rigor that I would expect from a piece of work with such a lofty accolade.

Although it contains many interesting facts gleaned from the results of recent psychological experiments, its style was too light and frivolous for my taste.I've never been a fan of attempts at humour in science books,as it seems to me to be a cheap marketing ploy and judging by the books success it seems to have worked.

To give it its due though,it does contain some enlightening information on the human thought process,that readers of pop pyschology will find interesting,and I feel that the outcomes of this type of research should be available to the general public,who after-all fund it in the first place.

The authors use of humour and conversational style makes what could have been a very dry book interesting and lively.

The book teaches us that we have a very poor idea of how to achieve happiness. Among other things we don’t account that our thinking and feelings change over time, that our psychological immune systems kick in to make bad things feel better and that we don’t realise how much our own mind hides from us when constructing our imagination.

The author's solution is to tell us to trust the feelings of others currently in the position that we would like to be in the future. The solution is simple and short but leaves you wanting more. If that’s your feeling too then I highly recommend reading ‘Happy’ by Derren Brown after this book or for something shorter and less academic than ‘Happy’ you could go for Mark Manson's ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***' (Amazon won't let me type out the books name probably).

I got something from this book, which is more than you can say for the usual self-help trash.

I enjoyed reading this overall though I found it around 50 pages too long for the content it conveys. It is a pretty thorough going-through of what happiness is and the science behind getting more of it. If you're determined to be happier, this will point you in the right direction as well as you could expect. There are a few easy solutions and a few more complicated solutions.

I have reviewed several books on this and related subjects. This one is unusual because it is written in an extremely chatty style but it is deceptively intelligent. Unlike some popular psychology books, this is based on the most respectable scientific research.

The author takes care to tell you at the beginning that there is no simple or clever way to increase your happiness. He warns you that he is going to delay the best advice to the end and that when it comes you won't like it. In the meantime he devotes much of the book to preparing you so that when it does come you realize that, frustrating as it is, his advice is exquisitely good.

{I never write spoilers in my reviews but if requested I will say more in a comment.)

This is a well researched book that is both witty and engaging and makes the rather dry subject of psychology fun to dip into.

Unfortunately, if you're currently feeling depressed or in search of meaning in your life or in your quest for happiness then you're very unlikely to find it within the pages of this book.

The authors compulsion to be continually amusing becomes tiresome after reading only a few chapters of the book so by the time I reached the Q & A section at the end of the book where the interviwer asks Gilbert if he is an optimist and is told " No sorry, I don't know the first thing about making eyeglasses", I realised that I had wasted my time reading this book.

Instead of reading 'Stumbling on Happiness' I should have picked up my copy of 'Learned Optimism' by Martin Seligman and re-read that instead - a book by an eminent psychologist that knows how to write with warmth and humour and really does teach a thing or two about happiness in the process.

Starts off well, but eventually I ran out of steam, wading through interminable summaries of psychological studies. One of the problems with scientists trying to write for a general public is that they often feel the need to reference things in the same way as an academic paper. I think the author could have established his credentials, told us that references are at the back of the book for those who are interested, and then just got on and told the story. Although his style is often humorous, the overall structure of the book is rambly and waffly. And I had that unsettling experience of reading a chapter on the way to work on the train, and by coffee-time being unable to remember any of it.

Might be useful to dip into, but to read from cover to cover I think it's just too dense and intent on establishing its own importance.

excellent. well written, relevant, great research and better still, so much food for thought. The point of the book could be summarised in one page, but every page is worth the read. There are a number of books around at present which are reshaping thought and psychology and finally putting the popular therapy style make yourself happy or you don't deserve to live, books out of print. About time! This is ne of them. One extremely important book. Don't expect the writer to tell you how to be happy. In fact, he himself points this out on numerous pages of the book.

Very well written with a huge amount of information about lots of experiments that have provided some surprising insights, pun intended, into happiness, why we want it and why it's difficult to find. I enjoyed the stumble and as a very average person, I can almost guarantee you will as well, so read the book to find out why I can be so confident on this.

A really good book, one of the best I read so far. It helps me to change a little the way I perceived external impulses and make better decisions.

Specifically ordered this version of the book for the cover as shown. However, this less aesthetic cover was sent. Quite disappointed, at least show that there are two versions.

Very good! And old book but an insightful one. Especially breaks certain myths on happniess