What I feel makes us different from animals is not being able to adapt, as you pointed out (many animals exhibit learned behavior and conscious decision making)

What I feel makes us different from animals is not being able to adapt, as you pointed out (many animals exhibit learned behavior and conscious decision making), it's not even being self-conscious (it's been proven animals can be too), it's in my opinion the ability to observe and act on your own thought-streams. And this is deeply linked to language, as language is a way to receive informations you don't already have and coerce your thoughts streams (or not) along them to make predictions that are not based on experience. In my opionion it is very important to make this distinction between predictions learned by experience and predictions learned by the books. I think we here can measure this difference very well. To me it looks like this added layer of brain cells we have acts as an observer on life happening on the floor below, kind of a god of your own brain, acting not on experience-learned behaviour but solely on a combination of representation learned from others (connections created willfully from other's discourse) and abstractions made from adaptive learning done on signals coming from the layers below (I envision an isolated system whose only object of observation is regular thoughts and whose only sense is signals coming through connections to layers producing those thoughts). It feel likes what makes us apart is first this simple fact we learn from our own though patterns. This enables us to make what (at least) feels like free decisions based on abstracted representation and not mere immediate experience. This enables us to think outside the box of our own experiences and form models of other's. This enables us to delibarately picture in our minds things that we have never experienced, or things that cannot be experienced (think abstract models in sciences). This finally enables us to accept information from our peers as valid signals to model our though-paths on. If this layer was anything real, to me it would mainly be an experience or information-sharing device. This thing that makes possible, and makes useful, the kind of social structure we know and live in. I may be rehashing common knowledge, I don't know.