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Researchers Pinpoint Brain's Sarcasm Sensor
LibertarianWackJob writes "Researchers have found the section of the human brain that is responsible for understanding sarcasm.
" I'm sure the comments on this story will be incredibly insightful.
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I'm sure the comments on this story will be incredibly insightful.
Not really, this one will be modded as funny. Oh wait.. you were being sarcastic.
What a really useful discovery.
Report being unable to confirm the discovery of the region in American subjects.
Man, I'm on *fire* today!
Deleted
"ooohh, a sarcasm detector. That's REALLY useful" - Comic Book Guy
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Scientists also located the area of the brain responsibile for gullibility, and they now have a procedure to remove that section of your brain.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
CBG: Oh yeah, everyone's real happy then.
Lyndsey Nagle: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
Frink: (With sarcasm detector) Are you kidding? This baby is off
the charts mm-hai.
CBG: A sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention.
(Sarcasm detector explodes)
char *mySig;
Am I the only one who finds it amusing that so far, not a single comment has been moderated "Insightful"?
Laughter is the best medicine, but in certain situations the Heimlich maneuver may be more appropriate.
My brain is obviously not equipped to handle this story.
You brain is obviously not equipped to be funny. You should take this stuff to the ametuer stand-up circuit; you'll have less time to post on Slashdot.
Wow. I feel like I just exercised my brain! Who knew being so vicious was so healthy? I'm not being a jerk; I'm exercising! Thanks, researchers!
But some brain-damaged people can't comprehend sarcasm...
We call them mods
I went to China and they caught sarcasm just fine.
Probably just told you that just so you didn't commit a cultural faux-pas.
Oh, hmm, this topic is on sarcasm, so anything I write will automatically be interpreted backwards But wait, that means that your post meant that actually the Chinese got sarcasm just fine, which means I don't need to post this....
Oh hell, I'm submitting it anyway.
But this research does serve a useful purpose in Autism/asperger syndrome.
Folks with asperger syndrome commonly have an inability to detect sarcasm and read facial, social cues.
>>By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naiveté, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like "little professors." However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context. Read full definition here
- dj
You can trust mainstream media such as Forbes (and Slashduh) to be brain-damaged as well.
"But some brain-damaged people can't comprehend sarcasm, and Israeli researchers think it's because a specific brain region has gone dark. [...]
"People with prefrontal brain damage suffer from difficulties in understanding other people's mental states, and they lack empathy," said study co-author Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a researcher at the University of Haifa. "
DUH!
We've known this at least since Phineas Gage's unfortunate accident with a tamping iron in 1848.
Given that we're talking about work by Shamay-Tsoory, a quick PubMed search says that the identified area is probably somewhere in the right ventromedial prefrontal lobe. That it can be identified by testing e.g. comprehension of sarcasm naturally gets twisted by Forbes/Slashduh, so now it looks like we've got a special Sarcasm Organ.
"Breaking news: Them science guys find out that our breathing is handled by large saccular organs in the thoracic cavity. They're calling 'em "lungs" in medical mumbo-jumbo."
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Here's a nut even the collective mind of Google has been unable to crack: Machine recognition of sarcasm.
Take a look at the Huh? Corp site, and notice the counterpoint between the devilishly satirical site content and the dead-serious Google ads.
One cannot underestimate the serious menace posed to contextual ad networks by the unregulated use of sarcasm by ad-network partner sites.
As soon as I finish typing up this comment I plan to file for a provisional patent on "An Automated Method of Determining Sarcasm Content by Using a Naive Baysian Classifier Trained on Slashdot Comments."