Fun fact: I love kids, especially babies. Sure they're cute, but it's equally as fascinating to me to watch them explore the world around them and try to make sense of this relatively new environment that they have been exposed to. Without the innate ability to speak or develop language to try and communicate, they're still able to show what they want and when. Whether through eye movements, crying, or pointing, a set of simple cues which may seem simple to everyone else, acts as one of their primary modes of survival. So as I was laying in bed thinking of the universe's great questions, as one does in the middle of the night when they can't sleep, a question came to mind. How do babies think?
As mentioned before, it takes at least a year for babies to start saying just a few words like "mama" and "dada" and actually understand the connection between the words and their meanings. However, they definitely know very early on who their parents are. What kept me up is wondering, how they separate these thoughts in their heads? How do they differentiate their family and familiar faces from complete strangers? Is it just a simple categorization of good and bad, old, and new?
If they're hungry, how do they separate that from being not hungry or satisfied with their food intake? If they're in pain, how do they separate that from what it's like to be in a stable physical state? Now I know what you might be thinking, they can obviously feel the difference between a pleasant and unpleasant state. But the action of feeling is different from thinking.
Up until now, I thought it was so simple. I equalized their feelings with their thoughts and failed to realize that there had to be something more. For the most part, their memories live in the short term, yet babies are continuously learning from their mistakes and trying new things. They're literally the world's smallest scientists, yet the way they think may be more complicated than that of a genius. And here I am left with the same thought I had laying in bed one night. How?
