 The story begins at the end of the 1980s in Parma, Italy, where the neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team were investigating the properties of the neurons in the macaque monkey ventral premotor cortex. Through single-cell recording experiments, they discovered that the activity of neurons in the area F5 is correlated with goal-directed motor actions and not with particular movements (Rizzolatti et al. 1988). For example, some F5 neurons fire when the monkey grasps an object, regardless of whether the monkey uses the left or the right hand. A plausible interpretation of these results is that neurons in monkey area F5 encode motor intentions (i.e., those intentions causing and guiding actions like reaching, grasping, holding, etc.) and not mere kinematic instructions (i.e., those representations specifying the fine-grained motor details of an action). (In-depth philosophical analyses of the notion of motor intention can be found in: Brozzo forthcoming; Butterfill &amp; Sinigaglia 2014; Pacherie 2000). This was an already interesting result, but it was not what the Parma group became famous for. Rather, their striking discovery happened a few years later, helped by serendipity. Researchers were recording the activity of F5 neurons in a macaque monkey performing an object-retrieval task. In between trials, the monkey stood still and watched an experimenter setting up the new trial, with microelectrodes still measuring the monkey’s brain activity. Surprisingly, some of the F5 neurons turned out to fire when the monkey saw the experimenter grasping and placing objects. This almost immediately led to new experiments, which revealed that a portion of F5 neurons not only fire when the monkey performs a certain goal-directed motor action (say, bringing a piece of food to the mouth), but also when it sees another agent performing the same (type of) action (di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Gallese et al. 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1996). For this reason, these neurons were aptly called “mirror neurons”, and it was proposed that they encode motor intentions both during action execution and action observation (Rizzolatti &amp; Sinigaglia 2007, forthcoming). Later studies found mirror neurons also in the macaque monkey inferior parietal lobule (Gallese et al. 2002), which together with the ventral premotor cortex constitutes the monkey cortical mirror neuron circuit (Rizzolatti &amp; Craighero 2004).