but that doesn’t mean we can’t think of things we haven’t learned about.

Can you think of a colour have you never seen? Could you imagine the colour green if you had never seen it?

The creative process is more modification than creation. taking some inputs, mixing them with other inputs and having an output that has parts of all out inputs, does it sound familiar? But without those input seems impossible to create an output.

And thus the importance of language in an actual intelligent consciousness. Without language the brain could only do direct modifications of the natural inputs, of external inputs. But with language the brain can take an external input, then transform it into a "language output" and immediately take that "language output" and read it as an input, process it, and go on. I think that's the core concept that makes humans different from any other species, this middle thing that we can use to dialogue with ourselves and push our minds further. Not every human may have a constant inner monologue, but every human is capable to talking to themself, and will probably do when making a decision. Without language (language could take many forms, not just spoken language, but the more complex feels like it would be the better) I don't know how this self influence process could take place.