Interview with Professor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, PhD

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is a professor at the Brain and Creativity Institute, the Department of Psychology, and the Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California. She is the director of the USC Center for the Neuroscience of Embodied Cognition, and her work focuses on how rudimentary sensorimotor systems in the brain may underlie higher cognitive processing. She has co-authored several publications about the Mirror Neuron system and how it connects back to cognitive functions. In this interview, you can read more about her and her research.

Q: Could you tell readers a little about yourself, and what first drew you to neuroscience?

Professor Aziz-Zadeh: I was always interested in psychology, and it was in my first year in college at UCLA I took Eran Zaidel’s biopsychology course that I discovered neuroscience and fell in love with learning about the brain.  I joined his lab as a volunteer that semester and have been in love with exploring the mysteries of the brain since.

Q: Your research examines how the brain helps us understand other people's actions and experiences. How would you explain this process to someone who has never studied neuroscience?

Professor Aziz-Zadeh: Through evolution, our brain was mainly oriented on homeostasis, which involved sensing and making actions.  Many of those same brain regions have been repurposed through evolution for more higher cognition – language, empathy, social skills, etc.  That’s what I study.

Q: How does the mirror neuron system fit into our broader understanding of how humans understand other people's actions?

Professor Aziz-Zadeh: We understand other people's actions, to some extent, by mapping them onto how we ourselves make those actions and thus understand the associated emotions, intentions, and consequences of that action.

Q: Mirror neurons are sometimes described as a mechanism for empathy. How accurate is that description, and what do you think is missing from that explanation?

Professor Aziz-Zadeh: Simulating other peoples actions can be a small part of empathy, but empathy is a complex social emotion.

Q:  Your work has explored action understanding, embodiment, and social cognition. What have these studies taught us about how the brain connects our own experiences with our understanding of other people?

Professor Aziz-Zadeh: We do use our own sensorimotor systems to understand other people – and sometimes these systems may be acting differently in conditions like autism, or when we don’t have the same body as other people, like in a congenital amputee.

Q: What advice would you give to a high school student who is interested in neuroscience and wants to learn more about the field? 

Professor Aziz-Zadeh: Listen to podcasts and read books and papers. Watch documentaries. Try to get involved in research, even if as a research participant.

You can read more about Professor Aziz-Zadeh’s work here.