Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is a interesting, enjoyable book to read, yet I found it very disturbing.  This book was very similar to Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, with lots of references to psych studies done on college students, some detail on how the brain works, but its almost the opposite.. rather than talk about the marvelous power the brain has as a graphics processor,  it talks about the “tricks” that your mind plays on you when you are thinking both about the past (memories) and the future (planning), and why we make choices that often make us UN-happy.  He is able to illustrate the concepts of why we might buy a new pair of shoes we don’t wear to why we choose a job that we don’t like… all is a single sentence.  If I had a complaint, it was that too much of the material is applied to the “general population”, most studies refer to the average and not standard deviation (of course, the last chapter covers how we all want to be different than others… to believe we are special (and have many average traits we believe are above average).   Why disturbing?  It makes you think, and question everything that you believe. That keeps me up more than any horror flick… pretty scary.