Your brain knows it's time to cook when the stove is on, and
the food and pots are out. When you rush away to calm a crying child, though,
cooking is over and it's time to be a parent. Your brain processes and responds
to these occurrences as distinct, unrelated events.
But it remains unclear exactly how the brain breaks such
experiences into "events," or the related groups that help us
mentally organize the day's many situations. A dominant concept of
event-perception known as prediction error says that our brain draws a line
between the end of one event and the start of another when things take an
unexpected turn (such as a suddenly distraught child).