Sarcasm experiment

Sarcasm’s a funny thing. You say the opposite of what you mean, but somehow the other person uses their knowledge of the situation and the ordinary meaning of your words to unwind the utterance and decode your intention.

A new study gives some insight into what’s happening brain-wise. Usually it’s the left hemisphere that handles language, but apparently when part of the right hemisphere is knocked out, people become unable to pick up on the paralinguistic cues (like intonational contour) that signal an indirect speech act like sarcasm.

Although people with mild Alzheimer’s disease perceived the sarcasm as well as anyone, it went over the heads of many of those with semantic dementia, a progressive brain disease in which people forget words and their meanings.

“You would think that because they lose language, they would pay close attention to the paralinguistic elements of the communication,” Dr. Rankin said.

To her surprise, though, the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.

Context, eh? Can’t understand sarcasm without that.

I’m serious.