A 30-year-old climber, Honnold is known as the master of a
discipline known as free solo climbing, which involves scaling vertical walls
without the help of ropes, harnesses, or anything that might break a fall.
The penalty for failure on those climbs is death.
Most of us would be overcome by fear long before we hauled
ourselves ropeless up the first 100 feet of the 2,500 foot El Sendero Luminoso
limestone cliff in Mexico, which Honnold scaled in 2014. Yet somehow he remains
calm, no matter what — to the point that he's known as Alex "No Big
Deal" Honnold.
People always him if he's fearless, to the point that he's
said he gets tired of answering the same questions. But it's a fair question —
is there something different about Honnold's brain? Is he truly fearless?
The climber has always insisted that he does feel fear, he
just prepares to the point that he knows he'll be able to accomplish his goal
by mentally rehearsing everything that could happen. Yet some of his climbs,
including at least one recent one up a route he'd never ascended before, make
you wonder if he really understands what it's like to be afraid.
To get to the bottom of that, journalist J.B. MacKinnon,
writing for Nautilus, asked Honnold if he'd be willing to get a brain scan with
an MRI.
Honnold said yes.
Cognitive neuroscientist Jane Joseph of the Medical
University of South Carolina agreed to do the scan. Mainly, she was looking to
answer two questions: First, if he had a healthy amygdala — the part of the
brain that responds to threatening or scary stimuli (and controls many of our
reactions to other phenomena) — what was happening there? And second, what
drives him to do this? Is it a pursuit of some rewarding feeling, some hit of
dopamine?
The full Nautilus story is worth a read, but basically,
Joseph and others who reviewed the MRI found nothing wrong with Honnold's brain.
His amygdala was there and didn't seem damaged. However, there was no activity
there even when the research team showed him a series of images designed to get
that region firing — disturbing and shocking things. Another climber whose
brain was used a control lit up just as expected, but Honnold's remained
silent.
It seems that despite the normal physiology, there was
nothing that looked like a normal fear response.
The reward response showed interesting results as well.
Things that would normally trigger a surge just didn't. Basically, Honnold was
an extremely high sensation seeker, according to Joseph. Basic "reward
tasks" weren't interesting enough. He sought out what most people consider
insanely thrilling or dangerous sensations in order to feel satisfied, and for
him (perhaps especially due to his fear response), that meant free solo
climbing.
But that still leaves the question of why Honnold's brain
works the way it does when confronted with frightening stimuli. To understand
that, we have to go back to the explanations Honnold has always given — he
understands that some moments are scary, but is able to mentally work past them…
"Particularly if it's a free solo, I'm climbing
ropeless, then I'll think through what it'll feel like to be in certain
positions, because some kinds of movements are insecure and so they're kind of
scarier than other types of moves, and so it's important to me think through
how that'll feel when I'm up there, so that when I'm doing it I don't suddenly
be like 'Oh my God, this is really scary!' I know that it's supposed to be
scary, I know that's going to be the move, I know what it'll feel like, and I
just do it."
Honnold's mental prep sounds like a psychological technique
known as "mental rehearsal," which is used to get ready for anything
difficult. Research has shown it can help doctors perform better. Astronauts
like Chris Hadfield say it's an essential part of their preparation for
spaceflight.
If you've already thought through how everything could feel,
even when it goes wrong, you're prepared if things actually do go south.
Rehearsing the way that certain scary moments will feel means
that those moments feel "right" when they happen, instead of feeling
surprising. In Honnold's case, we can't know exactly why his brain didn't
perceive the stimuli as worthy of amygdala activation. Perhaps his probably
already naturally hard-to-trigger fear response has been essentially trained
out of him through his own mental exercises. Joseph thinks you could probably
still trigger it, it would just take something a whole lot more intense.
Video at link
High functioning autism? I've taught kids with autism for 25 years. I married an AS woman and I'm step dad to AS lad. So many things about Alex point to the wonders of an AS brain. And it is a wonder: his transparency, his love of his own company, his ability to totally focus and to keep that self stimulation going. Even his charm is that of authenticity, no-one could learn his comfort with himself. I also think he's an amazing role model for all those kids out there who recognise that they march to the music of a different drum.
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