What thinking is

 What is human thinking? Consciousness is made of human awareness described in words.

Abstract symbolic thoughts made communication possible among the peoples, and by employing increasingly complex languages, self-awareness arose within the then primitive population unfolding multifaceted personal-subjective identities.

Abstract thinking also sharpened the practical reasoning connections needed for crafting tools and then to better their performance (the act of thinking about a design is to project the object in the future).

Having distinctive personal identities supported the task of perfecting the shared language among the members of a group and their acquaintances. The onset of trading among groups initiated a pervasive language.

The art painted on cave walls depicted both a representation and a language, symbols that transmitted a specific portraying to their social group. The handcrafted objects, more "portable", reflected the cultural identity from one group to the outsiders.

By making use of an abstract language that no other animal species has, the primitive men reflected for the first time about their present awareness and their own past.

The associative areas in the brain are able to store a lot of information about the environment. Everything  (that makes us humans) is about our ability to make many associations plus our mental skills for the classification and storage of this information.

Through the generations we have become more capable to identify and to recognize patterns in everything around us, building a memory that specializes in classifying and recalling similarities in models. Our search for associations and recognizable patterns in the objects is an early and very intense brain conditioning, enhanced by the genetic selection in our past generations.

The human infant is born with a very small brain and, as the newborn grows, the brain volume multiplies (an ancestral evolutionary characteristic) because all the mental processes that occur in the adult brain need space in the cerebral cortex, but it is not possible for a woman to give birth to a baby with a huge skull and brain cortex.

At birth and throughout childhood, the growing brain is exposed to a variety of stimuli, while developing and perceiving the events in the external world, then repeating them internally and finally communicating, that is, conveying them out.

This process of perception of environmental stimuli formats the personal inherited traits and adds some acquired characteristics. 

We, human adults, remember the things we learn to do successfully during our lifetime. We also pick up, with time, a capability to predict the future intentions of a person just by observing his/her present behavior. We also regularly find out what happens in a certain place while we are not there.

At times, we can understand or even guess what others are thinking. This ability to imagine the other person inside your mind is a special abstract thought that, together with language, have determined the success of the homo-sapiens species on this planet.

Human abstract thinking is now a sophisticated timeline, inventing the numerals first, then the arithmetic abstractions and the first drafts of Geometry, the Arts and Sciences, Trigonometry and Calculus, and lately in modern times: the mathematics of matrices, group theory, and chaos theory.

The same skills that first led us in the past to our language brought forward the algorithms of computer programs and communications networks, the newest stage for the human mind.