The Anime Brain

Learning a foreign language like Japanese is fun because it makes you more aware of how your own brain works. Like the “mystery of translation” I’ve written about before, the way the actual act of translating, say, a line from a dating-sim game we’ve licensed is not done by my conscious mind, but instead by a deeper place inside my brain. I mentally place a word or sentence that I want to translate into a special place in my mind and — ding! — a few seconds later I have the translation I need, just like cooking something in the microwave. I’m also amazed at the way the human brain can identify the subtleties of different human voices. I’m currently watching A Certain Scientific Railgun, enjoying the antics of the strong yuri character Kuroko. The first time I heard her character speak I knew instantly that she was voiced by talented seiyu Satomi Arai, who also played the kind-hearted ninja-maid from Code Geass. What a piece of work is the human brain!

Kuroko (left) is one of the more interesting characters in anime these days.