Climbing Without Fear

Want to experience some degree of vertigo? Just watch a video of Alex Honnold climbing. Even his own palms sweat when he watches himself on film. Honnold is, without question, the best free-solo climber in the world. His most recent accomplishment of free soloing the 3,200 vertical free rider route on El Capitan is widely considered the greatest rock-climbing achievement in history. It typically takes seasoned climbers four to five days to complete the route with ropes but Honnold did it in less than four hours without them. The documentary is titled “Free Solo” and it won the Oscar for “Best Documentary Feature” during the 2019 Academy Awards held on Feb. 24. The exciting part which many people agreed to is that his fingers do not have any more contact with the rock than most of us have with the touchscreens of our phones while his toes press down on to the edges as thin as sticks of gum.

Dr. Jane Joseph, a neuroscientist at South Carolina medical university, wanted to look at Honnold’s brain once she came to know that he doesn’t use any kind of drugs. Honnold happily agreed as he also wanted to gain a better understanding of what makes him tick. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner that measures brain activity by detecting any changes associated with the blood flow was used for the study. Dr. Jane is one of the first people to perform fMRIs on high sensation seekers. She saw the possibility of a unique typology in his brain. She put him in the super sensation seeker category - those who will pursue experiences at the outer limits of danger yet can tightly regulate their mind and body’s responses to them. She thought that this could be because of the absence of the amygdala, known as the brain’s fear centre. The amygdala sends information up the line to the higher processing centres in the brain’s cortical structures, where it is translated into the conscious emotion we call fear. In the scan images, surprisingly, they could find a healthy amygdala. Later inside the tube, Honnold was made to look at a series of about 200 images that flicked past at channel surfing speed. Ordinary people get disturbed or excited by those photographs as it included corpses with their facial features bloodily reorganized; a toilet choked with faeces; a woman shaving Brazilian style; two invigorating mountain-climbing scenes, etc. But his response to these were, “What? Was that supposed to do something for me?” Joseph also used a control subject — a high-sensation-seeking male rock climber of similar age to Honnold. Like Honnold, the control subject had also found the scanner tasks to be utterly unstimulating. Yet, in the fMRI images with brain activity indicated in electric purple, the control subject’s amygdala might as well be a neon sign, whereas Honnold’s is grey. He showed zero activation.

She thought that despite hearing from people about how dangerous it is, he still does it, so there may be some kind of solid reward, as the thrill of it might be very rewarding to him. To find this out, the “reward task” was carried out in the scanner in which he had the opportunity to win or lose small amounts of money depending on how quickly he clicks a button when signalled. This test would activate the reward circuitry strongly in the rest of us. So, in this case, she was looking most closely at the nucleus accumbens, which plays a role in the reward circuitry along with the amygdala. Nucleus accumbens is one of the principal processors of dopamine. In this task, once again, the control subject’s amygdala and several other brain structures looked like a Christmas tree lit up, whereas, in Honnold’s brain, the only activity was in the regions that process the visual input, confirming only that he had been awake and looking at the screen. The rest of his brain was in lifeless black and white. When the statistical threshold was dialled down, she could finally find a single voxel that had lit up in the amygdala. But, by that point, the real data was indistinguishable from the error.

Genetics has a more direct role in the personality traits that motivate Honnold’s rope less climbing. Sensation seeking is partly heritable and is associated with lower anxiety and a dulled response to any potentially dangerous situations. But it does come with a tendency to underestimate risks. A recent study on imbalance caused by the low amygdala reactivity and less effective inhibition of sensation seeking by the prefrontal cortex showed the same. Compared with data pools from her lab, Joseph found that Honnold was twice as sensation-seeking as an average person and 20 percent higher than any average high sensation seeker. “The sensation seekers need powerful stimuli to ramp up the dopamine circuitry, making them experience the feel rewarding,” Joseph says. Besides, this can lead to an endless pursuit of intense sensations, which contributes to addiction and dependency, particularly in substance abuse or even gambling. While Joseph was expecting Honnold to score low in the impulsivity traits survey, he scored on the high end. This explains his “fuck it” ascents, in which the composure gives way to depression and angst, and planning to, well, impulsivity. She concluded that the same might be happening as Honnold climbs rope less into situations that would cause almost any other person to meltdown in terror, i.e., where there is no activation, there probably is no threat response. The possible explanation for all this is the combination of nature (genetics) and nurture (deliberate re-evaluation) taming Honnold’s amygdalae, and allowing him to face the extra-ordinary terrors with extra-ordinary calm. To conclude, Honnold does have an extraordinary brain, and he really could be feeling no fear up there. None at all. None whatsoever. At 33 years old, Honnold has accepted that there will come a time when his athletic prime will be behind him. But for now, he’s in the best shape of his life and buoyed by the fact that the majority of his biggest career accomplishments have come in the last decade.