Although life unfolds in a continuous flow, our memories don’t capture it that way. We don’t recall the past as one seamless timeline but rather as a sequence of distinct, meaningful moments—much like how sentences are broken up with grammar and punctuation. This mental structure gives our experiences clarity and helps us understand both what happened and when it occurred.

The brain must devote a lot of space to this herculean task, right?

Wrong! It turns out that a tiny but mighty region pulls far more than its weight.