Briefly describe the definition and characteristics of thinking.

The concept of thinking: thinking is an indirect and general reflection of the objective reality of the human brain and an advanced form of cognition. It reflects the essential attributes and regular relations of objective things.

The main characteristics of thinking are indirectness and generality.

The indirectness of thinking refers to people's indirect understanding of objective things with the help of certain media and knowledge experience. The generality of thinking refers to extracting and summarizing the characteristics and laws of a class of things on the basis of a large number of perceptual materials. It is manifested in two aspects. First, thinking reflects the essential attributes of a class of things. Second, thinking can also reflect the internal relations and laws of things. What is thinking? In the past, people defined thinking as the general and indirect reflection of the objective reality by the human brain, which reflected the nature of things and the regular relationship between things. Thinking, like perception, reflects the individual attributes of things, individual things and their external characteristics and connections, and belongs to perceptual knowledge. Thinking reflects the same and essential attributes of things and the inherent and inevitable relationship between things, which belongs to rational understanding.