Mirror neurons: brain regions

Professor Christian Keysers explains that mirror neurons can be found in many regions of the brain.

The regions involved in the mirror system really depend on the kind of stimuli you are looking at. So if you are looking at people getting touched, some of the sensory areas of your own brain will become active. If you are watching someone for instance playing football, obviously parts involved in making actions like the pre-motor cortex and the posterior parietal cortex become activated. And if you see people’s emotions, for instance disgust, what you will activate is the interior insula that’s involved in having the same emotion. So overall a lot of parts of the brain can be recruited while you witness the experiences of other people, and what area will become involved freely depends on what you are seeing. The only things seeming to absolutely not to be recruited while you are witnessing other people’s actions is your primary motor cortex, namely the cortex that would directly control your muscles, and that’s why under normal conditions if you see someone do something, you don’t always puppeteer what that person would have done yourself.