On Sarcasm, Left Brain, Right Brain

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Jonah Lehrer, in his blog, The Frontal Cortex describes a beautiful metaphor for the left and right brains. Too long now, we have been seduced by popular science as reported in the press around the left brain being logical, right brain being creative. Whole programs have been constructed around this flimsy framework of understanding. The definition and metaphor below is the best I have seen yet:

…One of my favorite metaphors for our hemispheres comes from Jonathan Schooler, at UCSB. He argues that our hemispheres follow the same information processing strategy as the visual system. “One of the most fundamental features of how the brain sees is that it actually has two different ways of making sense of the world,” he told me recently. “We’ve got one visual system that’s interested in fine-grained details and clarity. That’s the system associated with the fovea and cones in the retina, which we use to perceive things like words on the page. But we’ve also got a more coarse-grained system too, which allows us to quickly grasp an entire scene, or to see some movement out of the corner of our eye.” According to this metaphor, the left hemisphere excels at the fine-grained and literal, while the right hemisphere is better at coarse-grained analysis, allowing us to make sense of things within their context.

Sarcasm, while often a Red Zone trigger, is a complex communication: it requires the detection of contradiction. Interestingly, humour also, is often the illumination of such contradiction. If it were not for the right brain’s ability to see the wider, connected view, then humour and sarcasm would be lost on us. Indeed, Lerher reports:

For instance, a 2005 study of patients with lesions to the ventromedial area of the right prefrontal cortex found that they exhibited severe deficits in understanding sarcastic speech, at least when compared to people with left PFC lesions.

Lehrer also reports the fascinating study, where left-ear auditory input provides a greater response to sarcasm than right-ear sarcasm. The right ear is linked, just like our eyes, to the left hemisphere of the brain, the left ear to the right. An amusing thought then – want to get away with a sarcastic comment? You have a greater chance if you utter the comment on the target person’s right side…

I digress however – the real motivation for this post was to add my voice to a growing dissatisfaction with what has been the popular view of left and right brain. The sarcasm study above shows that to understand the ‘big picture’ to get sarcasm, a right-brain ‘preference’.

If the creative/right. logical/left was an accurate construct, then perhaps studies might show that covering your right eye (and seeing only with your left) will allow you to see things from a creative perspective (remembering that the left eye is connected to the right brian). I’m not aware of this, or its reverse phenomenon, either from personal experience, or from the literature.

Frighteningly, left=logical, right=creative has its own culture, fanatical followers and belief systems. While there may remain some inherent value in the metaphor (by creating clarity around the difference between logic and creativity), the metaphor itself is vastly wrong and needs to be discredited.

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• Not in my right mind. (blogs.asce.org)
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• Ted Talks: Pawan Sinha on How Brains Learn to See (milkandcookies.com)