Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of many books including Crack In The Cosmic Egg, The Magical Child, and Evolution's End. For over thirty years he has lectured internationally on human development. Currently he is writing a book on the "biology of transcendence", and co-authoring Nurturing the Early Child, Family & Caregiver, a book and video series with Michael Mendizza. 

Piaget spoke of all development from birth through age fifteen as a slow movement from the concrete to the abstract. We move from that which is purely sensory motor, our physical world presented through the reptilian structure, on up until finally we are in the realm of pure thought itself. And of course, that's what the whole first fifteen years are about, to move into a realm of objective pure thought.

Critical thinking really comes in when formal operations unfold. All of a sudden children see lots of things as not valid and rightfully so. A sense of righteousness and justice and a set of high ideals begin to manifest in the child's mind. Where do these come from? They simply arrive full-blown with this age because the highest evolutionary structure of the mind is now being focused on for development. It's always been active, but now we're going to develop it fully. We have been operating on the physical world, now we move into a realm where we can actually operate on our own processes of thought, which means the processes of the brain itself.

What's happening? The eleven or twelve-year-old does not believe that any and all things are equally valid. They don't think that all things are equally possible. They no longer have an infinitely open structure; the system has pretty well closed according to the culture in which that child was brought up. The house simply has to be brought to order.

It's important to realize the difference between concrete language and semantic language. Certainly, a language of abstract meaning starts becoming available somewhere around age seven, when we first begin to leave concrete language and move toward semantic language. But at age eleven, semantic language appears. What's the difference? All of our physical sciences, technologies, philosophies, religions, and everything like that, depend entirely on semantic language. All of it simply a semantic or abstract proposition.

There is a higher state of formal operational thinking within our own system; I'm going to talk about the really great peaks of scientific and creative thinking that have occurred. We refer to these as the eureka experience. The eureka experience contains a very strong element of the savant syndrome, as you'll discover when you study it further. Gordon Gould was awarded the Nobel for discovery of the laser in 1957-note, discovery of the laser, not invention of it. And by his account of the event, he was just doing nothing on a weekend, when suddenly the whole concept of the laser appeared in his mind as a single flash. Boom, here it came, the entire thing. And he was stunned, electrified. He was overwhelmed by the enormity, the magnitude of the single image that hit him in that split second. He spent the rest of the weekend writing madly, trying to get all of the implications and ramifications down on paper, trying to spell out all that he saw in that one split instant. And it was something that had never existed before in history. Some things do not exist in the whole universe except as we bring them about by ordering reality in a certain way; the laser was one of those. So there's the clearing of the decks, the arrival of the answer out of the blue, and then the final most critical point, the translation of that answer into the common domain. That took him all weekend and then there were years of work after that before the laser became an actual reality.