[ExI] Sarcasm

[Bryan Bishop]

On Friday 20 June 2008, hkhenson wrote:
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080620/sc_livescience/sarcasmse
>enasevolutionarysurvivalskill;_ylt=AmUrn21daOHtgsQar9PtRycDW7oF
>
> Someone might hunt up some more background on this.  I was a bit
> surprised that the brain seems to have a specific region that deals
> with sarcasm.  Personally I don't think I use sarcasm very often and
> (especially in an all text channel) don't always pick up on it.

There was an article I read a while ago that addressed all of these 
articles that try to find regions of the brain that are associated with 
certain processes. Ah, this was the same guy that wrote the Times 
bestseller regarding ants and society, emergence and the like. He also 
wrote a book about brains and his own personal journey into the abyss 
regarding neurofeedback, fMRI, etc. In this book, around page 15, he 
wrote that these studies about regions associated with a specific 
function (like sarcasm) are interesting and amusing, but ultimately 
they don't help you out at all, and ultimately you can't gain anything 
from it. Not as long as you can't get to those machines and do the 
feedback (these are my words I'm adding, not his).

- Bryan
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http://heybryan.org/