Latest breaking news: Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

[Tommy_Carcetti]

Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080620/sc_livescience/sarcasmseenasevolutionarysurvivalskill

By Meredith F. Small

Humans are fundamentally social animals. Our social nature means that we interact with each other in positive, friendly ways, and it also means we know how to manipulate others in a very negative way.

Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction.

So what?

I mean really, who cares? Oh for God's sake. Don't you have anything better to do that read this column?

According to Dr. Rankin, if you didn't get the sarcastic tone of the previous sentences you must have some damage to your parahippocampal gyrus which is located in the right brain. People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often loose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don't respond in a socially appropriate ways.

(More at link).....
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Yeah, like we need that to survive.

[DS1]

1. Also. Skull on a stick wards off unworthy rap battlers

[DarkTirade]

2. I SOOO see where you're coming from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjMYQyhjiYA

[Phillycat]

3. Horrible examples of sarcasm in that article.

It's like a robot wrote them.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

4. The writer should be shot for that!

[Scarlett17]

5. ". . .loose the ability to pick up on sarcasm. . ."

How about "loosing" the ability to use the correct word in a nationally published piece? God, I hate that. Where was her editor?

:banghead:

[Tommy_Carcetti]

7. Probably out drinking beer, the only thing for which editors are ever any good.

[MorningGlow]

6. Yay! I'm highly evolved!

Oh yeah. Like you didn't see that coming.
:rofl:

[Zuiderelle]

8. They lost me at "loose"

:eyes:

[RainDog]

9. my son with asperger's syndrome doesn't "get" a lot of sarcasm

and aspergers (high-functioning autism) means lack of social skills or reading of people. he also takes things literally more often than not.

when he was younger and we were washing the car, when I said "wash off the cat paws" - the tracks made by the cat, my son turned around and looked for the cat until he found him and washed the cat. just one example.

now the missed signals are more subtle b/c he's older, but it's still there.