If you missed the broadcast of the fabulous PBS show This Emotional Life, be sure to get a copy. It explores what science has learned about a vast range of human emotions, including happiness — the trademark subject of the show’s host, Dan Gilbert. A Harvard professor of social psychology, Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, a marvelous book on a subject that is near and dear to all our hearts. (I don’t discuss Gilbert’s research in The Hidden Brain, but much of Gilbert’s research involves the same unconscious mechanisms I discuss in the book.)

I remember one interview I conducted with Gilbert many years ago: After listening to him describe a series of incredible experiments that show how and why we fail to do what makes us happy, I asked Gilbert if his research had made him a happy person. Surely, once you figure out why people make choices that make them unhappy, it should be easy to do the opposite, right? Gilbert laughed and said he hadn’t really changed his own behavior — and that the best he could claim for himself was a better understanding about why he was not as happy as he could be.