Stumbling on Happiness: An insightful neuroscience self-help psychology book on cognitive enhancement and human behavior

by Daniel Todd Gilbert

‘The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.’

Kant argued that a person’s perception of a floating head is constructed from the person’s knowledge of floating heads, memory of floating heads, belief in floating heads, need for floating heads and sometimes–but not always–from the actual presence of a floating head itself.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it...

‘perception without conception is blind’,

evolution deserves the Microsoft Windows Award for installing it in every one of us without asking permission.

We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate.26

Rather than thinking of people as hopelessly Panglossian, then, we might think of them as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness.