Human beings have the curious habit of communicating using words that seem to be independent of the actual meaning of the sentences . Any poetry is a clear example of this, but our way of playing with language goes far beyond moments of artistic inspiration. Any of our conversations with our family, our friends, or our co-workers are plagued by moments in which what we want to say and what we say really seem to go in opposite directions. In fact, there are whole personalities that are forged in these kinds of contradictions.

The sarcasm is another way in which this symbolic shock is revealed. When you send a message that has a good deal of sarcasm built into it, you are signing exactly the opposite of what you are saying. And it is precisely this discrepancy that makes covert mocking a good source of mental gymnastics to train our creativity, according to some studies.

While issuing a message in which the information to be transmitted is perfectly encoded in a series of signs, which is what electronic systems do, issuing any other type of message means making greater demands on the brain, since it has to judge contextual elements and other variables that go far beyond the linguistic plane. Using sarcasm, both to produce it and to interpret it implies imagining something and at the same time its opposite , and this is a challenge for our organ of thought.

The human brain under the effects of sarcasm

Knowing whether someone is being sarcastic or not involves getting various parts of the brain to work together by shuffling through many possibilities and coming to a final agreement. In this way, while the language areas of the left hemisphere of the brain process the literal information of the words that have been recorded, other areas of the right hemisphere and the frontal lobes are in charge of analysing the social context in which the message has been collected and the emotional charge associated with it.

Thanks to this parallel processing it is possible to detect the contradiction between the literalness and the intentionality of the same message, and for this reason most people are not too bad at recognizing sarcasm when it is presented to them.

However, putting so many parts of the brain to work places a degree of demand on us that we do not face when processing literal messages. Interpreting pieces of sarcasm involves developing a kind of theory of mind to put oneself in the other’s place and infer the meaning of their words, and producing messages with irony involves being able to convey ideas by saying exactly the opposite. This is what has led some researchers to believe that people who are well versed in the art of sarcasm might perform better at certain creativity tasks simply because they have been training their brains without realizing it.

A little mental training in creativity

Reinforcing this idea, a group of researchers carried out in 2011 a series of experiments that showed how exposure to sarcastic speech improves people’s performance in tasks related to creativity .

In this research, volunteers heard a message recorded on a customer service phone line used by a company. On this audio track, a person could be heard complaining about the time slot during which the company was making deliveries. However, not all participants heard the same message. Some people were able to hear a message in which the complaint was expressed directly, aggressively and with negative intonation. Others heard a complaint in an ironic way, with negative intonation but positive language. A third group of volunteers heard a complaint with neutral language and a tone of voice devoid of emotionality.

After experiencing this, participants were asked to solve a number of problems, some of which required lateral thinking and creativity and others being analytical in nature. People who had heard the complaints in an aggressive tone performed slightly better than the others in solving the analytical tasks, but did worse on the tasks that demanded creativity. It was the volunteers who had heard the complaint in a sarcastic tone who stood out with significantly better scores in the creative problems .

Apparently, people whose brains had to work to interpret sarcastic speech had thus become more capable of solving tasks whose resolution depends on integrating varied information that is not directly related to the instructions to be followed. In this way, someone who has been exposed to irony can excel in lateral thinking by finding new relationships between apparently distant ideas.

Aiming for new research

Clearly, more research is still needed to see if the effects of this mental training from processing sarcasm are sustained over time or if they depend on how often people deliver sarcastic messages. Sarcastic people may be more creative, or we may all see our ability to think creatively improve equally after being exposed to a lot of irony.

In any case, it is not difficult to intuitively find a relationship between sarcasm and creativity . The idea of a brain used to work on the one hand with literal elements and on the other with emotional and contextual aspects is a powerful image, easily associated to the world of people who work producing art, trying to express sensations that go beyond the technique and the elements used and that think in the context in which their work will be exposed. Although I’m sure you’ve already noticed that.

Bibliographic references

  • Miron-Spektor, E. Efrat-Teister, D., Rafaeli, A., Schwarz Cohen, O. (2011). Other’s anger makes people work harder not smarter: The effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytical thinking. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(5), pp. 1065 – 1075.
  • Shamay-Tsoori, S. G. and Tomer, R. (2005). The Neuroanatomical Basis of Understanding Sarcasm and Its Relationship to Social Cognition. Neuropsychology, 19(3), pp. 288 – 300.