Another post by the worse writer ever!

Illustration by Lars Wannop (Fabrica)

Exaggeration, inversion of truth, inversion of meaning, reductio ad absurdum, the obvious alternative, past experience… what am I talking about?

People always tell me they don’t understand if I’m serious or I’m sarcastic.
Once I thought it was because of me: “Maybe I’m not good at mocking”, I thought.
Now I’ve changed my mind.
Perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking.

Thanks to Dr. Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain which perceives sarcasm is not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.

That means that if someone has a problem understanding a social situation, he or she may fail to understand the literal language.
So guys… next time I say “Nice weather we’re having!”, please at least have a look at my raincoat, or I will tell you have social problems!

See also our previous post Joking aside, joking…inside!

Filed Under Media & Society, Research, World Health