The use of sarcasm could make us more creative

Human beings have the curious habit of communicate 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 relatives, our friends or co-workers is riddled with moments when what we want to say and what we say really seem to go in different directions. opposite. In fact, there are entire personalities that are forged in this type of contradiction.

He sarcasm is another of the ways in which this symbolic clash is revealed. When you send out a message that has a fair amount of sarcasm built into it, you are signing the exact opposite of what you say. And it is precisely this discrepancy that makes covert mocking a good source of mental gymnastics for 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 the systems do electronics, emitting any other type of message means demanding more from the brain, since it has to judge contextual elements and other variables that go far beyond the plane linguistic. Making use of sarcasm, both to produce it and to interpret it,

implies imagining something and at the same time its opposite, and that supposes a challenge for our organ of thought.

The human brain under the influence of sarcasm

Knowing if someone is being sarcastic or not involves making several parts of the brain work together, considering many possibilities and reaching a final agreement. Thus, while the language areas of the left hemisphere of the brain process the verbatim information of the words that have been registered while other areas of the right hemisphere and the frontal lobes are in charge of analyzing the Social context in which the message and the emotional charge associated with it have been collected.

Thanks to this parallel processing it is possible to detect the contradiction between the literality and the intentionality of the same message, which is why most of us aren't terribly bad at recognizing sarcasm when it's thrown at us. presents.

However, putting so many parts of the brain to work places a degree of demand that we do not face when processing literal messages. Performing pieces of sarcasm involves developing a kind of Theory of mind to put yourself in another's place and infer the meaning of their words, and producing messages with irony means being able to convey ideas by saying exactly the opposite. This is what has led some researchers to believe that people versed in the art of sarcasm could perform better for certain tasks related to creativity for the simple fact that you have been training your brain without realizing it account.

A little mental training in creativity

Reinforcing this idea, a group of researchers carried out in 2011 a series of experiments in which it was verified how exposure to a speech with touches of sarcasm improves the performance of people in tasks related to creativity.

In this research, volunteers listened to a message recorded on the customer service phone line used by a company. In this audio track a person could be heard complaining about the time slot during which the company made 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 a negative intonation. Others heard a complaint in an ironic key, with negative intonation but positive language. A third group of volunteers listened to a complaint in neutral language and in a tone of voice devoid of emotionality.

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

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

Pointing to new research

It is clear that more research is still needed to see if the effects of this mental training from the sarcasm processing are maintained more or less over time or if they depend on the frequency with which people send messages sarcastic. Sarcastic people may be more creative, or it may be that all of us see equally enhance our ability to think creatively after being exposed to a serving of irony.

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