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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Grasping is a big deal in neuroscience. It's one of the first things we do, and we happen to be pretty good at it. Mirror neurons were discovered when scientists were looking at a monkey's brain function during grasping. Grasping is a big deal because of prosthetic design, robot design and the lingering fascination with AI.
The frontal lobe is big in humans and this probably accounts for why we get up to so much complicated business like global capitalism and network technologies and art that animals don't bother with. The frontal lobe takes care of planning and evaluating and setting goals. But it is also responsible for motor control. Recently on Dr. Ginger Campbell's Brain Science Podcast, Dr. Art Glenburg explained a bit about the study of embodied cognition, which explores the hypothesis that "high level cognition is really based on lower level processes," such as "neural systems that control action, neural systems that control perception, and neural systems that control emotion." This work in cognitive psychology predates the discovery of mirror neurons in neuroscience. Mirror neurons add emphasis to the concept that the "brain evolved for action."