What are you reading?

I'm reading Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, and enjoying it very much. Ms. Grandin is herself autistic, and has come to believe that animals think visually, whereas humans think in language. The autistic lie along the continuum between those two poles. When she is thinking, Ms. Grandin sees a videotape running through her mind, and when she reaches a conclusion she has to translate it into words.

One consequence of visual thinking, she says, is that animals see all the details that humans routinely overlook. The observation has enormous implications for animal management, which is Grandin's career. She reports on an experiment in which people are asked to watch a basketball game. During the game someone wanders onto the court wearing a gorilla suit.

Asked about the gorilla-suited person after the game, fully half of the viewers report that they did not see any gorilla. Why not? Because it was unexpected in that context, Grandin believes, and people only see what they expect to see.

That got me to thinking. What are the gorillas that investors are overlooking these days? What are trust marketers failing to see?