
The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber (2016) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/61/coordinates/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber-rp
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foobarbecue
Weird to see this article doing the rounds again. I've spent a fair amount of
time with Alex (climbing, doing jigsaw puzzles, etc). He's totally normal,
just strong, motivated, and disciplined. Nautilus publishes a lot of
pseudoscience that wouldn't be accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, and this
is perfect example. A claim of reading personality based on fMRI study of a
single person's brain, which shows slightly different bloodflow amounts in a
particular place. NB: I haven't talked to him about this article so don't know
what his opinion is on it.

~~~
RaceWon
I know personally my body has (seemingly) felt fear independent of my mind,
and I have heard other drivers talk about this too. Typically this happens
when you (think you) know you can execute a corner flat out, yet your foot
lifts off the throttle just a bit all by itself; is one example that springs
to mind.

I wonder how climbers overcome this?

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csours
I'm not generally afraid of snakes, but while hiking at dusk one time I jumped
in the air, and THEN realized there was a snake in the path.

~~~
vborovikov
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_detection_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_detection_theory)

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donw
Alex has always been a bit... well, Alex. I'm not surprised that there is
something different about his neural anatomy.

Case-in-point: many, many moons ago, he hobbled into the climbing gym with
approximately 50% of his limbs interred in plaster casts. Apparently, he had
some sort of skiing accident, and had broken... well, lots of things.

Including most of one of his hands -- only the last two fingers poked out.

He then proceeded to train and climb pretty much as normal, flashing routes
that I never actually managed to complete. And he wasn't showing off, either.
It was just a sort of normal day of training.

I can't imagine most... really, any other athlete I know doing anything like
that.

He's just... Alex.

~~~
foobarbecue
By "approximately 50% of his limbs," do you mean "one limb" or "two limbs"?
I'm pretty sure he has four...

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> He might insist that he feels fear (he describes standing on Thank God
Ledge as “surprisingly scary”), but he has become a paramount symbol of
fearlessness.

So, this is how to not do science: "This man has no fear. How does he do it?
We scanned his brain and found he has no fear!".

It's not like you should automatically discard any experiment that justifies
cultural expectations. But you should be really, really suspicious of any such
result.

On a side note (and more controversially) modern neuroscience, with its fMRI
conjectures, is starting to look a lot like craniometry.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Isn't it just an outworking of monism - the brain is a machine, a part of that
machine must be responsible for a particular function.

People who injure specific regions lose specific abilities. Magnetic
stimulation of particular regions leads to different feelings, etc..

It doesn't seem that misguided as a first approximation?

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
The problem is with collecting evidence for what you take to be the truth in
the first place. It's called confirmation bias and it has nothing to do with
methodology, instruments, or techniques. What goes wrong is in the space
between the experiment and the interpretation of the experiment: if you set
out to prove something you already hold to be the truth, you're very likely to
"prove" it regardless of what your data, or your results, actually say.

It might sound strange, but the right way to conduct a study is not to start
with a hypothesis and gather evidence to support it. Instead, what you're
supposed to do (but nobody ever does) is to first collect some observations,
then come up with an hypothesis to explain them, then collect more, _new_
evidence and test whether _this new evidence_ supports the hypothesis.

Otherwise, you risk collecting only the evidence that supports your
hypothesis- or interpreting it in a way that supports it. Not that doing
things "the right way" keeps you safe, either. In practice, everyone will have
preconceptions and already-formed ideas about what is true and what is not and
no amount of good practice will completely protect you from drawing the
conclusions you prefer from whatever data you collect.

So, when you see a study that starts out with the premise that "this man is
fearless" concluding that "this man's brain can feel no fear" it should ring
all the alarm bells and raise all the red flags. Especially so if the study
(or at least the article reporting it) stresses the subject's fearlessness
continuously.

In short, this study seems to have found exactly what the researchers expected
to find. That's as bad as it gets.

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waitButWhy
I bet the truth is, when it comes to static imagery, Alex Honnold just
registers as excitable about different subject matter.

It sounds like they tried a largely negative gore-oriented image set (injuries
and depictions of people in distress) to induce what could probably more
accurately be interpretted as an unpleasant state of mind. For regular people
of middling intellect who live sheltered lives, being subjected to strange
viewing habits in a clinical setting probably registers as extremely odd.
Alex, on the other hand approached the experiment after reaching a degree of
celebrity that puts him beyond the possibility of an assessment that restricts
him from acting freely.

He didn't submit to the experiment, until his career was sufficiently
rewarding enough to be innately recognized as highly skilled, and thus beyond
the reach of ordinary doctors adjucating him as a threat to himself or others,
and thus preventing him from doing what he loves.

Therefore, nothing about the experimental setting was threatening, and he felt
no pressure to masquerade with a "normal" response deceptively, or else
attract psychiatric scrutiny, perhaps warranting medication and inviting
pressure from family members and see other facets of his support network turn
against him. With broad fame, he effectively deflects any ordinary
institutional authority, and he has social proof of success, no matter what
the machine records and reveals unexpectedly.

So then, take other conceptual image sets, and see what _does_ catch a rise
out of Alex Honnold, and I bet you'll find he's as human as any of us.

Show him sprawling incredible mountain vistas looking at the sun rise over a
himalayan cloud deck, rivaling or far surpassing anything you could hope to
see from the top of a tall building and I bet something jumps out from deeper
within, than showing him images of a train wreck, because it has to be
something real to him. Then the measurements will start showing numbers in
keeping with other people's reaction to visual stimuli.

In psychology subject matter specific to the individual counts, and Alex has
different tastes.

~~~
bdamm
Or perhaps a rope, dangling 20ft too short, would trigger him. I think you’re
right. His “mental armor” technique is noteworthy, though. People often
overlook the very significant training he undertook.

~~~
waitButWhy
Yeah, and honestly, I'm willing to bet that just " _showing someone pictures_
" on some level simply doesn't work on a significant number of people.

Within a certain threshold, simply looking at an image will register an amount
of activity in anybody's brain, but I think the context of the viewing
situation, combined with the power differential of the individual controlling
the slide show, obviously plays more heavily on the mind than the subject
matter of the image itself.

For example, a kidnapper asking for a million dollars, and showing you a
picture of your own child tied to a chair, while cocking a pistol and pointing
it at you, is going to stress you a lot more as a credible threat, than a grad
student in a doctor's office asking you to "think about things," while showing
you a picture of some random crying child, while an MRI clicks and hums around
you.

But for some people (probably many people), the grad student with the
clipboard and the MRI, is actually kind of scary in it's own strange way.

~~~
joveian
These days it is not hard to come across a variety of shocking images and I
can imagine that exposure to those could be correlated with the sensation
seeking thing, making the images much more ordinary and leaving other
considerations as stronger effects.

For some of us, the images themselves would be quite disturbing; just the
description of them (that I have heard before) was enough to provoke a fairly
strong reaction for me. I might have a somewhat unusually strong reaction, but
I would have guessed that it was a fairly small percentage of people who would
have little or no reaction. OTOH, a lot of things would make more sense if
that percentage was quite a bit higher than I would think.

Also, fMRI descriptions always make it sound like the brain is at rest until
it is being activated, but that is not how it works. Obviously the imaging
tries to take into account how it actually works, but there can still be a
number of issues. I don't know enough to have any idea how likely it is that
there are technical issues here, but functional imaging is an area where major
issues have gone undetected for surprisingly long periods of time so it should
always be considered a plausable theory that the imaging isn't actually
showing what we would like it to be showing.

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wu-ikkyu
Reading this reminded me of S.M., thr woman who literally cannot physically
feel fear

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._\(patient\))

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pauljaworski
I've always been in awe of Alex and thought, like the others in the "peanut
gallery", that there must be something different about the way his brain
functions. Very interesting to find out what that is!

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XalvinX
He's not the first to come along to receive this kind of attention and even
accolades from the general public, and naturally from other climbers who
sometimes do this, or would like to...including, I suppose, me.

Most of the ones that did receive a degree of fame from this activity, and got
filmed, on TV, and whatnot are now dead.

As a climber myself who sometimes freesolos even up to 400 meters "off the
deck" I don't see it as bad. What is stupid as fuck, however, is doing this
'on demand' for TV and film crews, and otherwise making a thing out of it at
all.

Sure, go out and do your thing quietly, why not? But the only way he can
continue to garner publicity (and let's be clear: money) is to push the limits
more and more each time. There is only one way that can go...

Will National Geographic put that on TV, when he 'craters' (as we say) and
blood, brains, and chips of bone splatter across the rocks? If they are
responsible they will, because by doing this stuff on TV he and they are
publicizing only the "glory" side of it, never mind all the people, some quite
famous, that did fucking crater...

So, while I do think he has achieved some great feats, I don't like what he is
doing for the reasons I just spelled out. And I don't think he will last long.
Those "chewing gum" edges do snap off, bats and birds do shit slimy shits on
required small edges, thunderstorms and hail storms and even snowstorms in the
middle of the summer can come out of the blue sky in minutes in the mountains,
and many other things can go wrong, including human error...and needless to
say, human error is very frequently preceded by ego and pride....it would be
very hard for someone to stay absolutely humble when the whole world is
cheering him on and calling him "World's Greatest"....

~~~
sandworm101
As a former big wall climber I would add that articles like this forget to
mention the difficulty factor. For some people a 5.10 is like walking on a
sidewalk. People who would be killed by falling off a sidewalk or down a set
of stairs (old people etc) rarely use harnesses. Risk is inversely related to
skill and ability.

At least a rock climber's fate is largely in their control. The well-traveled
Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you. Death zone, or ice climbers,
are the real crazies. They role the dice. Skill and ability means nothing when
the mountain decides to collapse underneath you. And such climbers tend to die
in groups, their fate linked to whoever else is on the rope. Free soloists die
alone.

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gkanai
> The well-traveled Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you.

Except when there are accidents. Like recently on El Capitan:
[https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount-
tragic-a...](https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount-tragic-
accident-on-el-caps-freeblast/)

~~~
foobarbecue
Does anyone know what went wrong there yet, exactly? Just insufficient pro and
unexpected fall?

~~~
sandworm101
Looks like the pair were simulclimbing and might not have had any pro between
them at a bad moment.

~~~
foobarbecue
In which case, gkanai is wrong -- the rock didn't "shift." This was almost
certainly human error.

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Apaec
Sorry for the stupid question but how does he get back down?

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taylorlapeyre
There are walk-offs for almost all of the routes he free solos. For any
others, he would have stashed some gear/ropes up top to rappel.

~~~
guywhocodes
He does a fair bit of down climbing too, he has described it as the most
important skill for free soloing before

~~~
kzrdude
There seems to be plenty of routes where down is impossible though, you just
have to continue

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otakucode
Studies like this are always interesting to me in that they tread the line
between neuroscience and philosophy. They show that a persons philosophical
outlook and thinking controls a great deal of how we process and respond to
the world. It's unfortunate that our societies usual reaction to attempting to
help those who have experienced trauma by getting them to deal with it and
move past it is to decry that as somehow 'victim blaming' or minimizing the
trauma. Our brains are amazingly adaptable. We can be trained to be utterly
fragile, or amazingly resilient. When shown an image like those shown to Alex
to elicit arousal, a person can either identify with the subjects in the photo
(an act which actually takes a great deal of mental effort, since images are
so profoundly different from reality), or recognize it as an image and deal
with it solely as it actually is. Whether you do one or another has
substantial consequences for you subjectively. And of course no one but
yourself can make that kind of choice.

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manmal
That’s an interesting quote to me:

“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.”

I didn’t know that the frontal cortex can calm one down. Is that what happens
in „normal people“ who are very stress resistant?

~~~
ablation
Is this similar to the kind of control that Wim Hoff has been seen to exert
when in cold situations, I wonder?

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mikec3010
I'm an online fan of his after watching many videos on yt. What surprises me
is that he (and all the climbers I've seen) aren't "ripped". For being able to
pull himself straight up half dome, I would expect the body to layer on a lot
more muscle.

Also, I hope he stops free soloing. It's amazing he can do that, but it's not
fair to all his fans who would be devastated if we lost him.

~~~
Zeebrommer
That's a paradoxical thing to say, since you probably discovered him through
his free soloing. You might not have been his fan had he not free solo'd.

~~~
mikec3010
That is true, the free soloing is the eye catcher. But he has a very likeable
and relatable personality too. I would be really sad if something happened to
him.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
People frequently dying doing roped climbing too, even the most experience and
skilled climbers; and often of stupid mistakes or random hazards.

But more importantly, it's probably better to let people do the things they
love as long as they're not directly hurting others. Surely the feelings of
fans shouldn't override the preferences of the object of their fanaticism.

~~~
mikec3010
And people doing roped climbing often fall and recover just fine, which is
impossible to do when you...dont have a rope.

I agree that nobody should be prevented from doing risky things. But when they
become "famous" I believe it reckless to disregard the feelings of their fans.

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breckuh
Are there any links to actual data or a peer-reviewed article?

~~~
foobarbecue
No, Nautilus is a beautiful and interesting publication, but it's a pseudo-
journal where people publish stuff they can't get into a real journal.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
What evidence are you aware of that indicates that they're even trying to come
across as a scientific journal? I'm pretty sure they're just a standard
Science! publication, like Popular Science.

~~~
foobarbecue
Popular Science, Newscientist, and their ilk generally report about research
that's published elsewhere, or write about engineers and scientists. Nautilus,
instead, publishes original research, written by engineers and scientists
themselves. I am not trying to say that Nautilus is intentionally defrauding
the public, but they are pioneering a new grey zone between journal and
magazine.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
You're just repeating the claim for which I requested evidence. What's the
basis for believing that they're publishing 'original research', instead of
regular journalism? What's the basis for your claim that their writers are
engineers and scientists?

And why is this 'grey'-er than scientists or engineers writing anything other
than scientific journal articles, e.g. books, magazine articles, essays, like
they've always done?

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moab9
a lot like a raccoon's apparently.

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bruthafez
The idea that honnold is the world's greatest climber is patently absurd and
false, he's just the only dude willing to do the crazy solos without a harness
-- aka the world's most risk taking climber. But "greatest climber?" Lol give
me a break lolololol

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skookum
In your haste to be derisive you missed the adjective "solo" in the title.
While I would agree Alex is probably not in the running for greatest climber,
I think one could make the case that he is the greatest solo climber, and or
at least the greatest living solo climber.

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bruthafez
I did not miss the word "solo." Honnold is not the worlds greatest solo
climber by a Longshot. He's the greatest "free solo" climber. A ton of solo
climbers are way better than him, they just use ropes

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curun1r
You're getting caught up in technical terminology whereas this article is
written for non-climbers. Those of us that have done the activity know the
difference between solo and free solo, but in the same way that you can't
expect articles for non-climbers to get the distinction between sport and trad
right (climbing is a sport, so it's all sport climbing, right?), You can't
expect them to get the solo/free-solo thing right either.

~~~
improbable22
To be fair, my first guess from the title was Reinhold Messner. Different kind
of solo. (And perhaps a better candidate for having strange biology?)

