Most of us are pretty good at pick up on satire . Quite frankly , we have to be . Much of the style we communicate as a modern society is structured around pernicious contextual cues that tell us whether someone ’s mockingly insulting or sincere . Many of us can even beak up on sarcasm when it ’s convey completely via text .
As prevalent as sarcasm is , there remains much about it that we simply do n’t understand from a neuroscience perspective .
We suspect , for example , that sarcastic financial statement “ practise ” the psyche more than sincere ones , and that vulnerability to sarcasm can even improve your creative problem solving skills . Why this is , however , remains a closed book . Other question revolve around the usefulness of pass on via irony . Did it develop as a mean value of doling out gentle or veiled insults ; or as an intentionally injurious trade name of critique ?
And for as well - honed as our sarcasm - detector typically are , our agreement of how it manage to parse out snark from serious-mindedness is special . We know , for exercise , that conditions like autism and schizophrenia can hamper a person ’s power to perceive sarcasm , but the chemical mechanism behind this disruption remain unclear .
Over at Smithsonian magazine , Richard Chin has explored the ins and outs of sarcasm use and detection ina really interesting piece(and I mean that sincerely ) on the science of irony . One section of the article you all might find particularly interesting muses on the evolution of sarcasm in the anonymizing region of the internet :
Among strangers , sarcasm use soars if the conversation is via an anon. computer chat room as opposed to confront to face , consort to a study by Jeffrey Hancock , a communication theory professor at Cornell University . This may be because it ’s safer to take chances some biting humor with someone you ’re never go to meet . He also noted that conversations type on a computer take more clock time than a face to face up discussion . hoi polloi may use that special time to construct more complicated ironic statements .
So ? I ’m just dying to hear what you all conceive . Really .
Read more over atSmithsonian.com
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