In countries where physical torture is illegal, the cruellest punishment that can be inflicted on an individual is solitary confinement. The "I" that exists by itself will surely go mad. Indeed, many students of the field think the evolutionary pressure that drove the enlargement of the human brain was not a need to survive in the natural environment but a need to negotiate the social one. The most obvious human attribute is language, and that is meaningless if there is no one to talk to. Less obvious, but just as important, is the ability to think oneself into the mind of another—in other words, to have a theory of mind. It is a combination of language and theory of mind that makes human society possible.
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