March 3: Visualizing Human Thought Elena Plante heads up the UA's speech, language and hearing sciences department. Throughout most of medical history, the human brain's ability to think and communicate thoughts could only be understood in terms of behavior following brain damage. But new tools for non-invasive studies of the normal brain are beginning to revolutionize what's known about brain function, allowing researchers for the first time to visualize human thought. "And we are only just beginning," Plante says.