Why Some Folks Just Don’t Get It

I once saw a funny describing a Sar - casum as the large void between you and the people who don’t get the joke. Well now science says they have figured out why…they are not wired to understand sarcasm. This is according to the researchers at Johns Hopkins University who studied the brains of 24 patients who no longer understood sarcasm.  All of the patients had a stroke that affected the right hemispheres of their brains. Their findings that with those with damage to the right sagittal stratum part of their brains turned out to be the ones who lost their sarcasm detectors. That’s because that part of the brain is a bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Why do we care? The hope is that knowing this can make it easier for stroke patients’ families to communicate. That’s because you literally have to be literal with these people!

LiveScience.com describes what happens when an average person is communicating with someone who is being sarcastic. Their brain has to interpret a very complex way of communicating. The listener’s brain first has to get the literal meaning of what you’re saying. Then other parts of your brain have to kick in and detect the components of sarcasm. That includes: a wider range of pitch in the voice, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech. That doesn’t even get into all the facial cues and body language that can be involved with a sarcastic delivery.