The use of sarcasm could make us more creative

It seems that sarcastic people tend to develop their artistic side.

We human beings have the curious habit of communicating using words communicating using words that seem to be independent of the real 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 members, our friends or co-workers are riddled with moments when what we mean and what we actually say seem to go in opposite directions. In fact, there are entire personalities that are forged in these kinds of contradictions.

The sarcasm is another form under which this symbolic clash is revealed. When you send a message with a good amount of sarcasm embedded in it, you are signing exactly the opposite of what you are saying. And it is precisely this discrepancy that makes the covert mocking attitude 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 places greater demands on the brain, since it has to judge contextual elements and other variables that go far beyond the linguistic plane. To use sarcasm, both to produce it and to interpret it, implies imagining something and at the same time interpreting it, involves imagining something and at the same time its oppositeand that 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 making various parts of the brain work together by shuffling through many possibilities and coming to a final agreement. Thus, while the language areas of the left hemisphere of the brain process the literal information literal information of the words that have been recorded while other areas of the right hemisphere and frontal lobes are responsible for analyzing the social context. social context in which the message has been picked up 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 of us are not too bad at recognizing sarcasm when it is presented to us.

However, putting so many parts of the brain to work places a degree of demand 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 person's shoes and infer the meaning of their words, and producing messages with irony involves being skilled at conveying ideas by saying the exact opposite. This is what has led some researchers to think that people versed in the art of sarcasm might perform better for certain creativity-related 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 conducted a series of experiments in 2011 in which they a series of experiments that showed how exposure to a speech with hints of sarcasm improves people's performance in creativity-related tasks..

In this research, volunteers listened to a message recorded on the customer service telephone 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 could hear a message in which the complaint was expressed directly, aggressively and with negative intonation. Others heard a complaint in an ironic tone, with negative intonation but positive language. A third group of volunteers listened to a complaint with neutral language and in a tone of voice devoid of emotionality.

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

Apparently, people whose brains had had to work to interpret sarcastic speech had thus become better able to solve tasks whose resolution depends on integrating varied information that is not directly related to the instructions to be followed. Thus, someone who has been exposed to irony can Excel in lateral thinking by finding new relationships between seemingly unrelated ideas.

Aiming for new research

Clearly, more research is still needed to see whether the effects of this mental training from sarcasm processing are more or less sustained over time or whether they depend on the frequency with which people deliver sarcastic messages. It may be that sarcastic people are more creative, or it may be that all people see our ability to think creatively improve equally 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 used to working 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 who think about the context in which their work will be exhibited. Although I'm sure you had already realized that.

Bibliographical 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 analytic 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.