Stanford University School of Medicine researchers asked subjects to listen to symphonies to probe one of the central abilities of the brain — segmenting the continual stream of sensory information into perceptual chunks to extract meaning.

Their study revealed new details about how the brain circuitry that is key to such “event segmentation” functions.

In the experiments, the subjects listened to symphonies of the English composer William Boyce while hooked up to an fMRI machine. The researchers’ analysis of the ten seconds surrounding movement transitions revealed that two distinct networks of brain regions were involved in perceiving the transitions — the ventral region of the prefrontal cortex and an area in the dorsal region.