Alex Honnold's amygdala 2

Honnold is history’s greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal, which means that, on epic days of soloing, he might spend 12 or more hours in the Death Zone. On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. Just watching a video of Honnold climbing will trigger some degree of vertigo, heart palpitations, or nausea in most people, and that’s if they can watch them at all. Even Honnold has said that his palms sweat when he watches himself on film…

Synnott got the biggest response from a story set in Oman, where the team had traveled by sailboat to visit the remote mountains of the Musandam Peninsula, which reaches like a skeletal hand into the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Coming upon an isolated village, they went ashore to mix with the locals. “At a certain point,” Synnott said, “these guys start yelling and they’re pointing up at the cliff. And we’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ And of course I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure I know.’ ”

Up came the photograph for the gasp from the crowd. There was Honnold, the same casual dude who was sitting on stage in a grey hoodie and khakis, now looking like a toy as he scaled a huge, bone-colored wall behind the town. (“The rock quality wasn’t the best,” Honnold said later.) He was alone and without a rope. Synnott summed up the villagers’ reaction: “Basically, they think Alex is a witch.”

When the Explorers Hall presentation concluded, the adventurers sat down to autograph posters. Three lines formed. In one of them, a neurobiologist waited to share a few words with Synnott about the part of the brain that triggers fear. The concerned scientist leaned in close, shot a glance toward Honnold, and said, “That kid’s amygdala isn’t firing.”…

Once upon a time, Honnold tells me, he would have been afraid—his word, not mine—to have psychologists and scientists looking at his brain, probing his behavior, surveying his personality. “I’ve always preferred not to look inside the sausage,” he says. “Like, if it works, it works. Why ask questions about it? But now I feel like I’ve sort of stepped past that.”…

In Honnold, Joseph saw the possibility of a more remarkable typology: the super sensation seeker, who pursues experiences at the outer limits of danger, yet is able to tightly regulate the mind and body’s responses to them. She is also simply in awe of what Honnold can do. She had tried to watch videos of him climbing ropeless, but being a low sensation seeker herself, found them overwhelming…

Medical literature includes cases of people with rare congenital conditions, such as Urbach-Wiethe disease, which damage and degrade the amygdala. While these people generally don’t experience fear, they also tend to show other bizarre symptoms, such as a total lack of concern for personal space. One individual was comfortable standing nose-to-nose with others while making direct eye contact…

Whatever else explains how Honnold can climb ropeless into the Death Zone, it isn’t because there’s an empty space where his amygdala should be. At a glance, Joseph says, the apparatus seems perfectly healthy.

Inside the tube, Honnold is looking at a series of about 200 images that flick past at the speed of channel surfing. The photographs are meant to disturb or excite. “At least in non-Alex people, these would evoke a strong response in the amygdala,” says Joseph. “I can’t bear to look at some of them, to be honest.” The selection includes corpses with their facial features bloodily reorganized; a toilet choked with feces; a woman shaving herself, Brazilian style; and two invigorating mountain-climbing scenes.

“Maybe his amygdala is not firing—he’s having no internal reactions to these stimuli,” says Joseph. “But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, ‘OK, I’m feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,’ but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down.”

There is also a more existential question. “Why does he do this?” she says. “He knows it’s life-threatening—I’m sure people tell him every day. So there may be some kind of really strong reward, like the thrill of it is very rewarding.”

To find out, Honnold is now running through a second experiment, the “reward task,” in the scanner. He can win or lose small amounts of money (the most he can win is $22) depending on how quickly he clicks a button when signaled. “It’s a task that we know activates the reward circuitry very strongly in the rest of us,” Joseph says.

In this case, she’s looking most closely at another brain apparatus, the nucleus accumbens, located not far from the amygdala (which is also at play in the reward circuitry) near the top of the brainstem. It is one of the principal processors of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that arouses desire and pleasure. High sensation seekers, Joseph explains, may require more stimulation than other people to get a dopamine hit…

“Because, I can’t say for sure, but I was like, whatever,” he says. The photographs, even the “gruesome burning children and stuff” struck him as dated and jaded. “It’s like looking through a curio museum.”…

Even to the untrained eye, the reason for her interest is clear. Joseph had used a control subject—a high-sensation-seeking male rock climber of similar age to Honnold—for comparison. Like Honnold, the control subject had described the scanner tasks as utterly unstimulating. Yet in the fMRI images of the two men’s responses to the high-arousal photographs, with brain activity indicated in electric purple, the control subject’s amygdala might as well be a neon sign. Honnold’s is gray. He shows zero activation.

Flip to the scans for the monetary reward task: Once again, the control subject’s amygdala and several other brain structures “look like a Christmas tree lit up,” Joseph says. In Honnold’s brain, the only activity is in the regions that process visual input, confirming only that he had been awake and looking at the screen. The rest of his brain is in lifeless black and white.

“There’s just not much going on in my brain,” Honnold muses. “It just doesn’t do anything.”…

Where there is no activation, she says, there probably is no threat response. Honnold really does have an extraordinary brain, and he really could be feeling no fear up there. None at all. None whatsoever.

In order to free solo the route, he first had to have the desire to do so. “I think that the unique thing isn’t my ability to solo, I think the unique thing is really wanting to,” Honnold says… (Honnold was also intensely shy, which made it difficult for him to find partners for roped climbing.) He saw their photographs in climbing magazines and knew—he just knew—that he wanted to put himself in those same kinds of positions: wildly exposed, potentially deadly, totally under control.

He is, in other words, the classic high sensation seeker…

Obviously, though, he didn’t give up after that first experience. Instead, Honnold donned what he called “mental armor” and crossed the threshold of fear again and again. “For every hard pitch I’ve soloed I’ve probably soloed a hundred easy pitches,” he says.

One by one, acts that had seemed outrageous to him began to seem not so crazy: soloing moves in which he hangs only by his fingers, for example, with his feet swinging in the open air, or, as he did in June on a notorious route called The Complete Scream, climbing ropeless up a pitch that he had never ascended before. In 12 years of free solos, Honnold has broken holds, had his feet slip, gotten off-route into unknown terrain, been surprised by animals like birds and ants, or just suffered “that fraying at the edges, you know, where you’ve just been up in the void too long.” But because he managed to deal with these problems, he gradually dampened his anxieties about them.

To get ready for one 1,200-foot-high ascent at the cutting edge of free soloing, he even visualized everything that could possibly go wrong—including “losing it,” falling off, and bleeding out on the rock below—to come to terms with those possibilities before he left the ground. Honnold completed that climb, known as Moonlight Buttress, in Utah’s Zion National Park, about 13 years after he started climbing, and four years after he started soloing…

Revisiting memories to cast them in a new light, Monfils says, is almost certainly something that we do all the time without being aware of it. But doing so actively, as Honnold did, is better—“a beautiful example of reconsolidation.”

Visualization—which we might think of as pre-consolidation, whereby a person pictures a future event rather than a past one—functions in much the same way. “To review move after move, you’d expect that he did consolidate his motor memory and as a result probably had an increased sense of competence,” Monfils says. Feelings of competence, in turn, have been shown to reduce anxiety, which helps to explain why, for example, people who are fearful of public speaking (as Honnold used to be, by the way) feel less anxious about it as they do it more often and develop their skills.

“It’s better over time if you can put yourself in a situation where you experience some fear, but you overcome it, and you do it again and again and again,” Monfils says. “It’s hard, and it’s a big investment, but it becomes easier.”…

There is genetic variability between individuals in all parts of the brain, LeDoux says, so it’s a fair bet that Honnold’s threat-response circuitry started out on the cool end of the spectrum—which would explain why his younger self saw a powerful appeal, rather than lethal danger, in the photographs of his ropeless climbing heroes. At least as important as the brain that Honnold was born with, however, is the one that he has wired for himself through thousands of hours of risk-taking. “His brain is probably predisposed to be less reactive to threats that other people would be naturally responsive to, simply because of the choices he’s made,” LeDoux says. “On top of that, these self-imposed strategies that he’s using make that even better, or stronger.”…

Compared against the data pool collected by Joseph’s lab, Honnold is twice as sensation-seeking as the average person, and fully 20 percent higher than the average high sensation seeker. The most likely explanation for his flatline amygdala activation in the scanner, Joseph says, is that the tasks she set for him simply were not strong enough tea.

Honnold also scores as exceedingly conscientious, associated with the ability to concentrate, remain focused on a task, and see things through. He also surveyed high in premeditation, his typical modus operandi, and very low in neuroticism, making him unlikely to ruminate over unlikely outcomes or risks that are impossible to manage. “If you don’t have any fear to begin with,” Honnold says, “there’s a lot less to control.”…

When I ask Honnold to describe the ideal free-solo psychological experience, he says, “You get into positions where you’re like, this is so outrageous, you know? Like, this is so amazing. That’s the whole point, really—to be up in some position that makes you feel like a total hero.”

Yet he also tells me that easier, day-to-day soloing (the kind that most rock climbers would still consider to be an extreme activity) has lost some of its novelty, and even life-list solos sometimes leave him underwhelmed. “I didn’t find it as fulfilling as I’d hoped,” Honnold has written about an all-day solo link-up of three difficult routes. “People might expect these kinds of climbing achievements to generate euphoria, but in fact I seem to experience the opposite.”…

Honnold could, in that sense, be “addicted to climbing,” Joseph says, and the hunger for sensation could push him ever closer to his limits as a free soloist. At the same time, a defining quality of his ropeless climbing has been the conscientiousness and premeditation that he brings to it. The greatest risk for Honnold, Joseph says, may lie in the tension between those opposing compulsions.

Joseph had expected Honnold to survey low in impulsivity traits, such as urgency and disinhibition, associated with rash decisions and actions taken without much thought to the consequences, particularly when a person is feeling down. In fact, he scored on the high end…

Here’s one: While “emotionally unhinged,” as he put it, by a faltering relationship in 2010, he soloed a 1,000-foot wall in the Nevada desert that he had climbed with a rope only once before, several years earlier. Honnold considers that climb an example of how he has learned to harness both positive and negative moods to achieve his goals. Obviously, it worked out fine—he is still around to tell the tale. But when I ask Joseph if she has any warning to offer Honnold based on the scan and survey results, she replies, “Don’t let the impulsivity win out over the conscientiousness.”…

“I definitely thought about how I process fear,” Honnold says. What he realized was that, in this case at least, he didn’t. He had been in similar situations so many times that it had become normal. There was nothing to process; there was only who he had become. “This is not scary,” he said to himself, “because this is what I do.”

http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climberA