I was only joking... LoL

New Scientist reports that Understanding Sarcasm is a Complex Business - from the article:

Different parts of the brain must work together to understand sarcasm, new research suggests. The prefrontal cortex - a small area in the front of the brain - seems to play the biggest role and may integrate the literal meaning of a phrase with the speaker’s emotional intent. The findings on the anatomy of sarcasm could have implications for understanding personality changes in people with brain injury or disease.

"Decision making, emotional processing, empathy, and theory of mind all appear to be involved in understanding sarcasm," says lead researcher Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a neuropsychologist at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.

This helps explain why interpreting sarcasm (and humor of any type possibly) is even harder when people are morphed into a text-only online world as well. I think it's common for people reading online text to focuse very closely on the most obvious meaning, which is why satire is missed (even when accompanied with an emoticon). It also reaffirms my belief that sarcasm is a higher form of wit:

Based on the findings, Shamay-Tsoory suggests that understanding sarcasm requires a series of events - the brain’s language areas interpret the literal meaning of a statement, the right hemisphere and frontal lobes process the emotional context, while the prefrontal cortex integrates the two.

It also presents a challenge for those of us who live in virtual spaces - how to maintain separate 'voices' for the real world and for virtual spaces, while maintaining our sarcastic tone. ;)