tease *
tease apart
loosen *

Music is still a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in skills that researchers are trying to tease apart.

It's difficult to tease apart whether gender or field of study is the driving force behind the average incomes in respective career tracks.

The surgeons who were working to "tease apart" the boys' brains discovered they were actually fused.

There was debate about the extent to which the dictatorships' very separate interests could be teased apart.

While it is difficult to tease apart a failure in perception from one in memory, some research has attempted to shed light on the issue.

Dr Zhang said the study aimed to "tease apart" different theories from those previous studies.

But whether some traits are more genetically controlled than others is much harder to tease apart.

When white girls wear dreadlocks and black girls go blond, another distinction is being teased apart, hair by hair.

Sexual activity and heart conditions can interact in complicated ways, which can be difficult to tease apart.

The chemosensory basis for detecting sweetness, which varies among both individuals and species, has only been teased apart in recent years.