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From the New York Times:
There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s
study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important
time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain
where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably
already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.
What you may not have realized is that 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. Those who lose
the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal
dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just
do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice
weather we’re having.”
“A lot of the social cognition we
take for granted and learn through childhood, the ability to
appreciate that someone else is being ironic or sarcastic or angry
— the so-called theory of mind that allows us to get inside
someone else’s head — is characteristically lost very
early in the course of frontotemporal dementia,” said Dr.
Bradley F. Boeve, a behavioral neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minn.
“It’s very disturbing for family members, but
neurologists haven’t had good tools for measuring it,”
he went on. “That’s why I found this study by Kate
Rankin and her group so fascinating.”
Dr. Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the
Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San
Francisco, used an innovative test developed in 2002, the Awareness
of Social Inference Test, or Tasit. It incorporates videotaped
examples of exchanges in which a person’s words seem
straightforward enough on paper, but are delivered in a sarcastic
style so ridiculously obvious to the able-brained that they seem
lifted from a sitcom.
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