This may explain my big head

Appreciating sarcasm: It's a brain thing

Scientists have discovered comedy central in the brain -- specific tissue regulating the ability to understand sarcasm.

People with damage to the right frontal lobe, right behind the eyes, are unable to appreciate this kind of humor.

In sarcasm, "the literal meaning is different from the true meaning, and some people just don't understand that difference," said Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a psychologist at the Rambam Medical Center and the University of Haifa in Israel. Her study appears in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology.

The study tested 25 people with damage to the frontal lobe, 16 with damage in the region to the back of the brain and 17 normal volunteers. Rigged to scanning devices, the subjects were presented with a series of sarcastic comments.

For instance: Joe came to work and fell asleep. His boss walks by. "Don't work too hard, Joe," he says. Both normal volunteers and people with damage to the back of the brain understood that the boss was being sarcastic.

But Shamay-Tsoory said that people with damage to the right frontal lobe didn't get the irony of the comment, and, in fact, failed to understand that the boss was not happy with his lethargic employee.

Shamay-Tsoory believes that apart from brain injury, perhaps even subtle differences in the "wiring" of this this region can leave people unable to empathize with others, and it is this lack of ascertaining another's emotional state that may be responsible for the inability to understand sarcasm.

I love sardonic humor (i.e., Dr. House and TWoP) so maybe I have five frontal lobes, which would of course lead to a freakishly large head. You think I'm kidding - but I'm Big Head McHuge. It's disturbingly ginormous. Sometimes I think it even disrupts the pull of gravity enough to affect global wind currents and therefore, the weather. Oh, I don't know. I'm just typing words.