Language Log: Locating the sarcasm bump?
I cann’t add anything to Mark Liberman’s comment Locating the sarcasm bump? on the discovery of a sarcastic center in the brain. So here I will quote him in length:
May 29, 2005
Locating the sarcasm bump?
In a significant advance for the modern science of phrenology, Dr. Simone Shamay-Tsoory and others at Haifa University have located the brain regions responsible for "understanding sarcastic comments": the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex. (S.G. Shamay-Tsoory and R. Tomer, "The Neuroanatomical Basis of Understanding Sarcasm and its Relationship to Social Cognition". Neuropsychology, 19(3), pp. 288-300 (2005)). The abstract:
The authors explored the neurobiology of sarcasm and the cognitive processes underlying it by examining the performance of participants with focal lesions on tasks that required understanding of sarcasm and social cognition. Participants with prefrontal damage (n = 25) showed impaired performance on the sarcasm task, whereas participants with posterior damage (n = 16) and healthy controls (n = 17) performed the same task without difficulty. Within the prefrontal group, right ventromedial lesions were associated with the most profound deficit in comprehending sarcasm. In addition, although the prefrontal damage was associated with deficits in theory of mind and right hemisphere damage was associated with deficits in identifying emotions, these 2 abilities were related to the ability to understand sarcasm. This suggests that the right frontal lobe mediates understanding of sarcasm by integrating affective processing with perspective taking.
I shouldn’t be too sarcastic here — the paper is interesting and suggestive. However, it exemplifies the tendency of scientists to assume without discussion that the common-sense categories of conscious experience must be in one-to-one correspondence with brain regions and with components in a functional "boxology". (And often with genes as well, though that’s a different story.) So when I read a paper whose second section heading is "The Anatomical Basis of Sarcasm", I get a sort of sinking feeling: here we go again.
There’s a compelling critique of neo-phrenology in Martha Farah’s 1994 article, "Neuropsychological inference with an interactive brain: A critique of the locality assumption", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17, 43-61. Plenty of others, before and since, have highlighted the problems that arise when we reason uncritically from lesion effects or from subtractive functional imaging to the functional and anatomical locality of some mental process or content. This is not to say that brain function is homogeneous, or that it is necessarily wrong that the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex "mediates understanding of sarcasm by integrating affective processing with perspective taking".
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Posted by Mark Liberman at May 29, 2005 10:03 AM