It's not about thinking. It's about perception. Savants and animals have a perception of reality that others may have lost, yes. As always, you need to be clear about what is perception (pattern recognition) and what is thinking (designing some form of action in the future). All living things have perception of some kind, but it may need a neo-cortex for thinking. The ability of someone to listen to a highly complex and lengthy piece of music, then to remember it note-perfect by playing it on the piano is a skill of perception and memory; no thinking involved whatsoever. The ability of someone to say, after a moment's reflection which day of the week it was on January 24, 1167 is not an act of thinking but an act of recognition. What the mind does naturally is to recognise. That is what a brain is for. Savants and animals are fabulously good at recognition, yes. Thinking, however, is a highly evolved skill of many parts involving values and beliefs and motivations and agendas and theories and risk-taking. Lifting a cup to your lips to swallow a liquid requires no thinking. The skill is embedded since infancy, so it is with savants. They 'see' (ie perceive) things you and I do not (clearly, some form of huge and efficient lookup table) but they are not necessarily better thinkers than you and me. The ability to do something instantaneously that would normally require heaps of computation is evidence of hugely efficient pattern recognition. I would say this is limbic brain stuff, the neo-cortex may have sat down on certain elements of our ancient brain and all but snuffed them out.
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