What do babies think about? Some of them seem to scream a lot, and others don't. Why? Baby psychology is very different from children and adults, because they have no past to draw from or frame of reference. They have only the eternal now. Babies truly live in the moment, although they are developing a memory. What happens when something falls down? They don't know. What is that large thing over there? For all they know, vacuum cleaners eat babies, and those large, grinning stuffed animals are predatory.
Most of a baby's first thoughts can be expressed as simple equations. Mom=food. Cat=softness then scratching. Car seat=movement and wild new colors. This is how human babies imprint, and then learn to think. We're not geese, we don't follow around the first creature seen upon emerging from the egg. We have rudimentary but evolving thought processes that start from simple logical construct of this means that.
Some things are instinctive; as babies know to recoil from pain, and to nurse. They do not necessarily know how to nurse, as in not to bite down or gnaw, but they know that they should nurse. And contrary to what some medical personnel in the earlier part of the 20th century thought, babies certainly do feel pain. Of course, you don't want pain to be what your baby is thinking about, because that sets up negative feedback loops in a mind that is forming its initial connections and pathways. Therefore, I believe that everything in a newborn baby's life should be quiet, gentle, and positive up until at least six months of age, when babies begin to have more complex thoughts above and beyond confusion and stimulus-response.
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