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Sarcasm Useful For Detecting Dementia
An anonymous reader writes "Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but Australian scientists are using it to diagnose dementia, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of New South Wales, found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic."
Studies also found that old people who do not have dementia are likely to whack you with their canes for sassing them.
Doctor: "Oh, yeaaaa, you're normal"
Patient: "Why you little whippernapper! *WHACK* *WHACK*"
Doctor: "No! Ow! No! It was a medical test!
Patient: "I lived through 15 wars and 5 depressions, and I'm not going to let some damn young quack backtalk me in the name of science!" *WHACK* *WHACK*
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm is indicated with a sarcasm mark, a character that looks like a backwards question mark at the end of a sentence, similar to Alcanter de Brahm's proposed irony mark ().
So did the fledgeling movement of Slashdotters who proposed using the tilde ~ as the sarcasm mark beat them to it?
<sarcasm>Really?</sarcasm>
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
...90% of the internet is demented.
I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
What a great idea.
If you're wondering if you've got dementia, and you thought this comment was sarcastic, then you have because it wasn't.
If you're not wondering if you've got dementia, then you have too because it totally was sarcastic.
Or maybe it's me who has dementia. I don't know if I'm being sarcastic. Oh dear.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Since sarcasm is notoriously difficult to convey online, does this mean the Internet is a dementia simulator? Actually, that would explain a lot of things...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You assume EVERYTHING is sarcasm?
Punch drunk, and without bail.
Maybe sarcasm is good to identify other diseases as well. That's why House is so good!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Doctors Recommend Reading Slashdot to Diagnose Dementia.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I am tired of people trying to appear insightful by stating an obvious irony in a sneering and sometimes exaggerated way
I bet you're fun at parties.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but Australian scientists are using it to diagnose dementia, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of New South Wales, found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic."
I have suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia since the age of 15. I'm 33 now, and I can say from my own personal experience that this is very true.
One of the many reasons I have trouble 'fitting in', especially at social gatherings, is my inability to detect sarcasm. It can be terrifying when someone says something that could be interpreted 'literally' as demeaning or cruel but is only 'joking around' etc.
I'm better now than I was, but usually only after getting to know a person well. Surprisingly however, even people I've known for 5+ years can still be sarcastic occasionally and it will go right over my head. They know about my illness however, and on occasions like those do me the favor of pointing out they were just being sarcastic, which helps.
I think the approach in the article could be a great diagnostic tool for early detection of these types of mental illness...I suffered from schizophrenia without knowing I had it for almost 10 years. My life fell to pieces; that and my family and friends (the few I had left) finally convinced me I had a problem. I was the last to know I had schizophrenia...and it has been very very difficult coming to terms with it.
Maybe if it was detected earlier I could have been treated earlier, and the damage to my life and my state of mind might have been mitigated considerably. I don't know.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
...parody is being used to detect Alzheimer's disease, and satire to detect lupus.
"Oooh, a sarcasm detector. That's a really useful invention."
I hereby propose that the customary "whoosh" be replaced with "You may have Frontotemporal Dementia. Please see your physician."
with a great love of sacrasm, I've noticed that there is a definite geographical component to it. For example, while traveling in the South, I discovered that my use of sarcasm was frequently either taken at face value, or misinterpreted as me just being an asshole. For instance, saying something like "nice weather today" (when it clearly is not) is an icebreaker that works across socioeconomic lines in a place like MA. However, [in my experience] in the South, uttering something so baldly wrong often earns you the you-are-an-idiot look. So while this test may be useful in cultures that actually use/value sarcasm, I think it may be less useful in ones that do not.
I bet you're fun at parties.
Ha! Dementia detected.
From my own experience I have noticed that people
in the very start of a psykosis episode also suffers from not beeing able to understand sarcasm.
This is before they show any real signs of the mental illness.
I lived together with a woman many years that had this kind of problems and I used sarcasm to check her up so to speak. It never failed to indicate when she was about to have a new episode and to be prepared to help her out.
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
People really eat this shit up, don't they? Not a god damned thing was funny about this, but it still got the mandatory +5 Funny like too many other lame unoriginal jokes.
Talking about the moderation is sooooo insightful.
If you can read and understand this, you don't need glasses^Wa fix for dementia.
Thanks!
Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit...
Never, never begin a submission with a clever aside. You're absolutely begging to be contradicted!
Here's the kind of wit that's lowest in my esteem, in rough order of lowness. Oddly enough, they're all popular on Slashdot!
I don't know if this is common or not, but an EMT seemed to use this once to tell if I was going to pass out. I had broken my upper arm and at some point I guess I was looking whiter than usual (according to my friends). After putting the arm in a sling the EMT looked at me very seriously and said something like "What's the problem? You're a big guy. What's the big deal?" I was confused for a moment, then I realized he was being sarcastic and I laughed. When I did, he smiled, patted me on the (other) shoulder and announced "Yeah, he's okay. He'll be fine."
I thought that was a pretty good way to tell how out of it I was. Of course some people don't get sarcasm at all, so it might not work all the time.
Irony. The opposite of wrinkly.
The assumption that the only use of sarcasm is to make others look inferior or express dislike without any actual thought is the exact reason I look on anyone who looks down on it as just as stupid. The language is what it is, you can belittle and hurt just as easily with well formed, detailed criticism, you can be graceful or not. Sarcasm has never been the problem, assholes are the problem, and they were the problem long before they gave sarcasm a bad rap.
sarcasm is cultural.... I grew up in Jamaica, after moving to the US I had a very hard time understanding sarcasm which is very common here. In my experience growing up in Jamaica sarcasm wasn't common at all.
**Whoosh!**
He was saying (and I fully agree) that puns are a lower (much, IMO) form of humor than sarcasm.
Actually, what many people refer to as sarcasm is really irony or satire. Sarcasm implies scorn or contempt. It does not imply "saying the opposite of what you mean". That's a particular form of irony. It may be sarcasm if the intent is to wound or disparage, but if it's simply done in good humor, then it's not sarcasm at all.
Dry irony is actually one of my favorite forms of wit, although I tend to prefer when it's not too sarcastic.
Of course, we may be witnessing the evolution of language in action here. I'll be fascinated to see what the dictionaries say about sarcasm in another ten or twenty years.
I have suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia since the age of 15. I'm 33 now, and I can say from my own personal experience that this is very true.
One of the many reasons I have trouble 'fitting in', especially at social gatherings, is my inability to detect sarcasm. It can be terrifying when someone says something that could be interpreted 'literally' as demeaning or cruel but is only 'joking around' etc.
I think your friends are being passive agressive and there's nothing wrong with you. KILL THEM ALL.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
From TFA:
That sounds almost like a textbook description of Asperger's Syndrome. Hmmmm....
Irony. It's like goldy or bronzy, only it's made of iron.
Nice of you to jump to the conclusion that a psychiatrist only uses a single factor in testing for a mental illness. 'Cause the DSM IV is just FULL of illness that only have a single symptom which is NEVER a sign of another illness.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Researchers at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic."
-I guess this means that most cops are suffering from dementia.
This handy dandy little piece of information would have been helpful to know a while ago, especially before I told that Highway Patrolwomen she could put me in handcuffs anytime she wanted to.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
...just add fixin' to your lexicon. Wait, isn't lexicon in Massachusetts?
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
Or are you just pulling my leg?
Anyway, people with dementia also serve to fill in the missing pieces by making things up ("confabulation" is the unnecessarily obtuse term for it), frequently accusing people of saying or doing things against them when in fact they had no such intention. Thus, people with dementia should also often mistake plain statements for sarcasm.
Humor, now, that one would be hard to mistake. You may not think it's funny, but you get it or you don't. No mistaking it being personally directed. Much better diagnostic IMO.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B