Realism section explains that imagination suffers from shortcomings. The first shortcoming is a lack of accuracy or realism. Imagination relies on memory and perception, and both memory and perception are prone to omit important details and to add false details. In the Presentism section, Gilbert addresses the second major shortcoming of imagination which is that it is biased toward the present. People project their current circumstance and values onto the future, but the future is often different enough from the present as to make such projections misleading. One phenomenon related to this problem is that wonderful experiences are most treasured on their first occurrence but typically less so on subsequent occurrences. The third and final shortcoming is presented in the Rationalization section. People have a psychological immune system. They are prone to believe what benefits them and to disbelieve what does not benefit them. Gilbert says, “A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it”. The Corrigibility Section shows that illusions of foresight are best addressed when a person trying to anticipate a future experience turns to arbitrary, other people for insight about their related experience. Cultural values tend to be perpetuated as memes and sometimes falsify claims about what would make an individual happy. Reception Reviews of the book include: The Guardian: “Gilbert's book is a witty, racy and readable study of expectation, anticipation, memory and perception: all bits of scaffolding within the structure of happiness.” The Publishers Weekly: “a scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our search for happiness, … commonplace examples render a potentially academic topic accessible and educational, even if his approach is at times overly prescriptive.” Greater Good Magazine: “Although we imagine ourselves to be so unique as to be unable to use random people’s experience as a guide to personal fulfillment, Gilbert shows how this is actually a much better predictor of happiness than our own wishful thinking.” In 2007, the book was awarded the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books general prize for the best science writing for a non-specialist audience. See also Positive psychology The Black Swan (Taleb book) References External links Stumbling on Happiness web site including a blog Reviews of Stumbling on Happiness Short interview about the book from Comprehensive interview