Yes, two covers in two weeks. This time a Radiohead cover done by producer Mark Ronson. Very funky.

Here’s the original as the bonus.

Some sweet stuff here.

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Stumbling on Happiness
by Daniel Gilbert
(Buy it at Amazon)

Firstly, this is not a self-help book. I felt burning eyes of judgement when I pulled it out on the train but of course if I stood up and shouted the truth I’d look more crazy. This book is about the science behind happiness and how the brain works. It contains some very interesting revelations. If you won the lottery how happy do you think you would be in one year? More happy than someone who has a car accident and becomes paraplegic? Of course you would think you would be but Gilbert shows otherwise. We discover that lottery winners are equally as happy as paraplegics one year after the major change in their life.

There’s two reasons for this. Firstly, we are really bad at predicting future outcomes of events. We over-emphasise the duration and intensity of our abnormal feelings about these outcomes. We think a lottery winner would be a lot happier than they actually are and we think that these feelings would last a lot longer than they actually do. Secondly, we synthesise happiness in the absence of ‘real’ happiness. People whose situation from the outside may seem hopeless will often our brains soften the impact of bad events.

He also discusses how the brain ‘cheats’ in its memories by filtering out a lot of the boring stuff and highlights key points in events. For example, our opinion of a movie is heavily skewed towards the ending just because our brain picks key parts (it can’t store every event in our lives) out and ‘fills in’ the rest when required. This filling in is not always reliable though so although you may really enjoy a movie at the time but aren’t impressed by the ending, recalling the movie in a few months time will probably bring the bad ending to forefront so your memory later is that you didn’t really like it.

Maybe if I hadn’t already read The Paradox of Choice before reading this I would have gotten more out of it. There is a bit of overlap between Gilbert and Schwartz’s work. I did end up struggling through this one from about three-quarters of the way in until the end. The themes do get slightly repetitive although there is a liberal dab of humour thrown in there to keep you interested.

I wouldn’t recommend you read both Paradox and Stumbling and I would probably recommend Schwartz’s work over this one.

Gilbert’s appearance at TED is below and he covers a couple of the studies he discusses in the book.

Doodle by Lee. The code for this doodle and other doodles you can use on your blog can be found at Doodles.

Oh no, an episode with a warm and fuzzy message!

I don’t really like Björk very much. I think her music is overly pretentious. Maybe that’s just me, I dunno. There is one song however that I do like and it’s this one. It’s a cover of Betty Hutton’s Blow a Fuse retitled It’s Oh So Quiet. The clip is directed by the incredible Spike Jonze (probably my favourite video clip director).

I will say though, that she does have a reputation of being very unique in her dealings with the press.

Some art drawn over the top of São Paulo’s stormwater drains.

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