6 Answers

  1. I remember myself from the age of two. He still spoke badly, but that didn't mean he was thinking badly. Thoughts don't necessarily translate into words. There is a good expression: a thought uttered is a lie. Most likely, children think in images, their own ideas about life.

  2. Children think in images, they reflect and understand the world without words, learn individual properties (delicious, sweet, bitter, warm, wet, full, hungry, etc.). Do you think why an infant unwraps a candy, does not take it in his mouth because he was burned or not that it is not delicious? Information about the world is already stored in his mind, and what is it then, if not thoughts. thinking is not a reflection of the world in the mind. They are already using this information.This is understandable even to such an amateur in psychology as I am a resident of the Kazakh village, maybe a respected professor of psychology did not have children yet

  3. The ability to think comes only with the ability to speak.

    When a child is born, he has no thoughts at all. There are only needs that it communicates with its innate cry.

    Somewhere from 2 months, the child establishes a connection with an adult. He gets the idea that the parent is warmth, affection. We see that the child is already smiling at the adult, because the adult is a release from colic, it is food.

    From the age of six months, an important moment comes when the child begins to establish a connection with objects. He needs to get acquainted with them, there is a pointing gesture:”Give.” That is, there is no truly formulated thought, but there is interest in the subject, there are emotions. This is not yet an understanding of the world, so far it is only being reflected. If the child gets his hands on an object, he throws it to see what happens. It's too early to talk about goal setting, it's just an instinctive action. How will the ball show up if you throw it: will it break, or will it spill, or what? Experience is being accumulated.

    Gradually, the child remembers words and sentences. He starts making the first sounds that sound right to him, like real words, but his parents don't understand them yet. And already closer to a year and a half, the sound device is ready to launch and along with the first words come the first thoughts.

  4. I remember a period of time when I couldn't speak. The speech of adults was perceived as a set of sounds and reproduced it, repeated it. It was an unintelligible continuous imitation of speech. Prior to mastering it, my thoughts had wandered spontaneously. I looked at the objects,but I didn't really understand them. This can be compared to the brain activity of an adult during severe fatigue, perhaps even intoxication, when you involuntarily perform actions that do not affect the consciousness, but sometimes pop up in the subconscious(otherwise I would not have remembered that moment from childhood). Humanity has developed many habits throughout history, including the habit of naming everything around us. And these habits sometimes prevent us from exploring pure patterns. In early childhood, we don't give names to objects,so we can't use them. When you see an unknown object, you begin to analyze it, draw analogies with other similar objects that you know, and search for information. The child, the baby, has not yet grown up to this, so it just spontaneously touches, tastes and does not think about why it is needed, how it is used.

  5. To draw an unambiguous parallel: “I think means I speak, I speak means I think” is somehow too primitive. In this case, what to do with people who are deaf from birth? They don't speak (and they learn sign language much later than normal children learn it), so they can't think? Nonsense)

    A person's thoughts appear much earlier, not yet being able to speak, the child performs actions that require making primitive decisions (which toy to choose?), concentration (the ability to focus on one particular subject), building simple cause-and – effect relationships (mom took a spoon-so we will eat), and so on.

    If you look physiologically, the child's brain “matures” (i.e., roughly speaking, it becomes structurally and functionally similar to the adult brain) by 1-1.5 years. I.e., at this age, the child has all the physiological possibilities for the formation and development of thinking.

  6. It depends on what you mean by “thinking”. If conscious manipulation of symbols, speech particles, then, before mastering the language, most likely nothing. And if you allow extraverbal thinking, so to speak, “the perfect radiance of a pure mind contemplating itself,” then there are reasons to think that the child is making sense of the entire universe. There are reasons to think that when you are at the peak of your psychedelic experience, you think in the same way that children do before mastering speech and dividing the world into objects.

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