Oh, Great Job, Scientists. GREAT Job.

I'm not going to make a "and we still haven't cured cancer" comment here, because there's a lot of things we haven't cured, so shut up.

But scientists from the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel have discovered the sarcasm center of the brain.

Here's the important part of the article, if'n you're interested:

Researchers studied 25 participants with damage to their prefrontal lobes, 16 participants with damage in the posterior lobes, and 17 healthy controls. They assessed people's ability to understand someone else's emotional state by testing how well they could recognise different facial expressions and tone of voice.

To determine if participants understood sarcasm, researchers read a sarcastic and non-sarcastic version of a story and asked participants what the speaker meant in each situation.

Long story short, the sarcasm center is in your prefrontal lobe, and processing sarcasm is a combination of both basic language understanding and emotional understanding. Which I could have told them, if they had just asked.

But more importantly than all that, I desperately want to watch video of scientists sarcastically reading a story to patients with brain damage.

On a related topic, I wonder, if I went around punching people in the forehead, if they'd like me more, or stop understanding me altogether?

Via Austinist. The picture up top is from
The Sarcastic Clapping Family of Southhampton.