feral children never develop what I would call the higher thinking. They still have mobility, spatial, etc. But "consciousness" is probably not something they really put together.
This is just my opinion. I think it took most of your brain to formulate that rebuttal, not concurrently, but as a deep and rich model of how readers might respond to a given argument, and weighing in a narrative sense your remembered experience vs what you "heard" me say in your head when you looked at these squiggly lines. Probably you even had a nascent image of me that was an amalgamation of your past experiences with internet idiots (fairly!) etc.
That's a lot, lot more than what a bug does when it finds its way past a complex maze, and probably something feral children lack.
I think all our higher level "reasoning" is a cooption of these systems.
There's a point in infant development where speech and social skills are developed, after which they cannot be. I'd go so far as to argue you'll never make a mathematician or physicist out of a feral child. Something critical to our higher level thinking is formed then. If missed, it cannot be recovered.
The flip side is I deeply believe if you can hold this conversation with me, then we both can be the best mathematicians there are, if only we took time to develop that language.