ABSTRACT
Giacomo Rizzolatti is famous for discovering mirror neurons in certain regions of the brain that fire when an animal executes a motor act while observing a similar act at the same time – a neural mechanism that appears to be involved in understanding other people's actions and emotional empathy. While still serving his internship in neurology, Rizzolatti became proficient using the electroencephalograph and published his first paper on light-sensitive epilepsy. In exploring the behavioural functions of his newly defined premotor regions, Rizzolatti obtained the most interesting results by recording from F5, which lay in the lateral-ventral part of premotor cortex – a site partly corresponding to Broca's area in humans. Rizzolatti's identification of mirror neurons has become one of the most exciting areas of research and has put the problem of how we understand others at the forefront of social neuroscience.
