How does the brain understand what another person is doing without having to think about it? Giacomo Rizzolatti, who discovered mirror neurons, explains why action understanding is rooted in the motor system , and why the concept must now expand from individual mirror neurons to a mirror brain that spans parietal, premotor, and motor cortex. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Giacomo Rizzolatti joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to revisit and extend the mirror neuron framework he pioneered. The core finding remains: neurons in the macaque premotor cortex (area F5) and parietal cortex fire both when the monkey performs a goal-directed action and when it observes another agent performing a similar action. Rizzolatti emphasizes that this is not simple visual-motor transformation , th ...