Neural unscrambling of temporal information during a nonlinear narrative.

Although we must experience our lives chronologically, storytellers often manipulate the order in which they relay events. How the brain processes temporal information while encoding a nonlinear narrative remains unclear. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging during movie watching to investigate which brain regions are sensitive to information about time in a narrative and test whether the representation of temporal context across a narrative is more influenced by the order in which events are presented or their underlying chronological sequence.