This Is Your Sarcastic Brain. Yeah, Right.

Anyone who has ever parented a 13-year-old human female knows this already: There is a sarcasm neural system, and its appearance must be associated with early adolescence.

So far only the first assertion has been confirmed by neuroscience. Katherine Rankin, a University of California, San Francisco investigator, combined fMRI and a test on the awareness of social inference.  She found that the right parahippocampal gyrus, previously associated with spacial context, is also involved with the ability to perceive the verbal and visual cues of sarcasm; or, in other words, with social context.  Patients with damage to that region lose the capacity to sense social nuances.

As a New York Times piece on the Rankin study notes, understanding someone else’s point of view, even when sarcastically expressed, is tantamount to the appreciation that there are minds and subjectivities other than one’s own, and to ability to relate to them.  When this ability is impaired it’s particularly disturbing to family and friends because a crucial element of the relationship with that person has been lost.

Actually the area identified by UCSF study only accounts for perceiving sarcasm, not for a teen’s ability to generate it.  I was just being sarcastic.

Tags: Neuroscience

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