Neurons in the premotor and motor cortex fire when an individual performs an action, and thus it might be expected that these neurons are silenced when the individual is required to refrain from a particular action. However, Bonini et al. show that, in macaque monkeys trained in a go–no-go task, some premotor cortex neurons fired both when the monkeys were required to grasp an object and when they were required to refrain from grasping the object. Some premotor cortex mirror neurons — neurons that fire during an activity and during the observation of another individual carrying out the same activity — also fired during the observation of a second monkey refraining from grasping the object. Thus, the premotor cortex may encode representations of an action (both our own and that of others) even when the action is repressed.