Thinking is a mental process of indirect and generalized reflection of objective reality by the psyche. Thinking differs from all other cognitive processes in that subjectively or objectively new knowledge becomes its result.
Isolation of thinking as a separate mental process is very conditional - it permeates all other cognitive processes: perception, attention, memory. But if all other processes are associated with sensory reflection of objects and phenomena of reality, then thinking reveals connections between them, which are not given in direct sensory perception. The result of sensory perception is an image correlated with a specific object, the result of thinking is a concept, a generalized reflection of a whole category of objects.
There are different levels of thinking. Elementary level - practical thinking, subdivided into visual-effective and visual-figurative. Visual-effective thinking is characterized by the solution of mental tasks in the process of interaction with real objects. This is the very first type of thinking that is formed in a child.
Visual-figurative thinking is no longer "tied" to real objects, but interacts with their images, which are stored in operative and long-term memory.
Both types of practical thinking in their embryonic state are also represented in higher animals. Theoretical thinking is a higher level inherent only in humans. It is subdivided into figurative and conceptual.
Theoretical figurative thinking, like visual-effective thinking, operates with images stored by memory. The main difference from visual-action thinking is that images are extracted from long-term memory and creatively transformed. Such thinking plays a major role in the activities of artists, writers and other people of art.
If in theoretical figurative thinking there is still a connection with images of perception, then in conceptual thinking it, if not completely lost, then becomes very mediated. Theoretical thinking operates not with images, but with concepts. The concepts themselves are also the result of thinking: memory retains images of many similar objects, thinking identifies their common features, on the basis of which a generalized designation of a class of objects is born. The word is the expression of a concept, therefore theoretical thinking is impossible without speech.
The concept may have a greater degree of generalization. For example, the word "cat" generalizes all cats that a person has ever seen or can see, but still this word allows us to imagine a certain specific cat that a person once and somewhere perceived through the senses. The concept of "animal" has a greater degree of generalization: there is no "animal in general", it is impossible to see it, but this does not prevent conceptual thinking from operating with this concept.
Thus, theoretical conceptual thinking is a reflection of reality, abstracted from specific images, and is the highest form of thinking.
