A Look into Alex Honnold's Brain

How does someone free solo a 101 story building? Scientists have taken a look.

Alex Honnold just climbed the 1,667-foot Taipei 101 building live for the world to see. He did it without a harness. Just him free soloing a building, while people were inside pointing their cameras out the windows as he was maneuvering up the building.

His first words at the top? "Sick." Then he took a selfie.

How does someone deal with the fear and pressure of knowing one mistake means death? Fortunately for us, neuroscientists scanned Honnold’s brain.

To tackle such an endeavor, mastery of climbing is a given, but how does someone deal with the fear, anxiety, and pressure of such an undertaking? When most of us stare down from the third story balcony of our hotel room and experience fear from leaning over the edge, how is Honnold able to master his emotions and inner dialogue to handle the challenge? His nickname, “No Big Deal,” provides a clue.

Neuroscientist Jane Joseph took a peek inside Honnold’s brain to see if she could find an answer. While lying in an fMRI machine to scan blood flow in his brain, Honnold watched a series of disturbing images flash in front of his eyes. Think disfigured bloody corpses or a toilet filled with feces. Pictures designed to make just about anyone cringe. Even if we have no visceral experience, for even the strongest among us, our brain will betray us with an internal sign of provocation. An almond-shaped part of our brain called the amygdala should light up. The amygdala has many functions, primary among them is to detect and respond to threats. When disgusting or threatening pictures—like those shown to Honnold—trigger the amygdala, the amygdala starts a cascade of events that eventually results in a slew of hormones released and nervous system activity. We call this a stress response.

In a conversation captured in the magazine Nautilus, Honnold asked whether or not the images of children burning counted as stress? Despite being reassured by Joseph that such images routinely elicit some sort of emotional arousal, even in rock climbers and adrenaline junkies, Honnold quipped, “Because, I can’t say for sure, but I was like, whatever.“ And as Joseph would later see, Honnold wasn’t putting on an act. His brain echoed his experience. There were no flashes of color to indicate activity in the brain’s threat and fear sensing areas, just grey. Honnold’s amygdala didn’t react to a single disturbing image. Not a blip of activity.

Whenever we face a seemingly stressful situation, our brain has a choice: to sound the alarm system, prepare us for some threat, or stay silent. When Honnold is staring at disturbing images, or even when he’s looking over the edge of a tall building, it’s not that Honnold’s Amygdala is absent or doesn’t work. It’s that the level of stimulus needed to trigger a response is astronomically high. His brain treats the stressful as if it were mundane. We all have different “breaking points” for when something is judged threatening enough to push the panic button, to alert the rest of our body to be prepared for potential disaster. Honnold’s superpower might be that his emotional reactivity is monk-like. When the rest of us are smashing the panic button, heading toward a freak out, Honnold’s mind is enjoying the scenery, quietly thinking there’s no threat here.

Honnold isn’t superhuman. Shortly into his first attempt to climb El Capitan, Honnold mused, “This sucks. I don’t want to be here. I’m over it.” He pulled the plug, explaining, “I don’t know if I can try with everybody watching. It’s too scary.”[i] It’s not that Honnold never experiences threats, that his amygdala never lights up. It does so when he needs it to. That day, fear rang out, and he listened, pulling the plug before disaster struck. He’d wait to reach his goal another day.

Through a bit of luck, the right genes, and countless hours of mental and physical rehearsal, Honnold has fine-tuned his threat-detecting machinery to be triggered when something is truly off. Not when pictures pop up on a computer screen, but when he can’t actually complete the task he sets out to. Our body’s alarm system is malleable. We don’t have to be monk-like and turn the knobs to adjust our sensitivity. We just have to get better at predicting.

Research consistently shows that tougher individuals are able to perceive stressful situations as challenges instead of threats. A challenge is something that’s difficult, but manageable. On the other hand, a threat is something we’re just trying to survive, to get through. This difference in appraisals isn’t because of an unshakable confidence or because tougher individuals downplay the difficulty. Rather, those who can see situations as a challenge developed the ability to quickly and accurately assess the situation and their ability to cope with it. An honest appraisal is all about giving your mind better data to predict with. Like an epidemiologist predicting the public’s response to a novel virus, a better appraisal allows us to unleash the response we need for that situation and moment.

“I definitely thought about how I process fear,” Honnold says. What he realized was that, in this case at least, he had no reason to be afraid. He’d 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.”

While it’s impossible to know if Honnold was born with this super power, or developed it...it’s likely a little of both. We have ample evidence that stress inoculation turns down that threat sensitivity. We can see it in experts in meditation and athletes.

Antoine Lutz and his colleagues at the Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin explored the same phenomenon that Daniel Cleather experienced when he sat with getting a large tattoo; pain. Only the researchers were after the inner workings of the mind, recruiting volunteers to lie in a brain-scanning fMRI machine, all while experiencing pain. Instead of a tattoo, volunteers were subjected to a different kind of discomfort, a hot probe placed on the skin directly below their wrist. While half of the subjects were your average joe when it came to handling pain, the other half were a bit different. They’d each spent over 10,000 hours performing Buddhist-style meditation.

When the painful probe touched the skin, both the meditators and the control group experienced the same intensity of pain, just above a seven out of ten. However, when researchers surveyed the participants on the unpleasantness (i.e., how much the pain was bothering them), the results were diametrically opposed. The novices rated the same pain intensity as nearly twice as unpleasant. Both groups felt the same amount of pain, but their reaction to it was entirely different.

Peering into the expert meditator’s brains provided an answer as to why. It started before they even felt discomfort. In anticipation of the scolding hot probe, an area in the brain related to emotional processing called the amygdala lit up in the novices, signaling a threat was on its way. Their monk-like counterparts had a comparatively low response. Before they even felt pain, both groups were preparing in drastically different ways. One was on high alert, readying for catastrophe. The other was aware but decided not to trigger the alarm. As the painful probe touched the subject’s skin, the experts quickly habituated to the pain, decreasing it as they lay in the scanner while the novices felt their pain grow. It wasn’t that the expert meditators were shutting off their response; they had developed a different way to respond. Instead of sounding the alarm, they were taking an alternative route to deal with this foreign sensation. They were actually activating the insula, a part of the brain linked to integrating the significance of the sensations one experiences. Meditation had taught them how to not jump straight from pain to freak out but to find another path—not by ignoring or forcing, but by accepting and working their way through it. When the expert meditators were asked what the sensation of pain felt like, they didn’t respond with tales of pushing through the pain or “toughing” it out. Instead, they described the pain as “softer” with “less dwelling.” They had a “greater ability to fully embrace the feeling of pain and … let go of the appraisal of what the pain meant to them.” The researchers concluded that these individuals had somehow developed the “capacity to flexibly modulate conditioned automatic reactions to an aversive event.” In laymen’s terms, they’d figured out how to turn a nearly automatic reaction into a thoughtful response.

After the 2004 Olympics, psychologist Hap Davis took a group of elite-level swimmers and stuck them in an fMRI machine to scan their brains. Similar to a post-competition film review session that you’d see in football or basketball, the swimmers were shown videos of when they failed. Races where they’d fallen short of their goal, missed out on making the Olympic team, or let their team down. When watching their failures, the swimmer’s amygdalas lit up, with only a small activation in the brain’s motor cortex. Their brain was sounding the alarm, triggering a reaction that amplified the negative emotions related to their own failure. After noticing the trend, Davis took the athletes and put them through a brief training program designed to rewire their response to their failure by understanding and evaluating the emotions and their response to them. After the intervention, the swimmers were once again subjected to watching their worst performances. This time, the internal response differed, with a smaller amygdala and higher motor cortex response. Davis told Time Magazine, “Watching the failure washed out the negative emotion. Now I can discuss it with you, and it’s no big deal.”

Sounds a little bit like Honnold doesn’t it? We may not all be Alex Honnold. But we can shift how our alarm works. Most of it comes down to: perceived capabilities vs. demands. If we've repeatedly shown that we can handle the task, even if it seems insane to others...our brain gradually turns down the alarm. And frees us up to do what we know how to do.

(This was excerpted from my book Do Hard Things.)

-Steve