This famous free climber (no ropes or safety equipment) has been much in the news lately. Tests reveal that his fear reaction, arising from the amygdala, is very different from most people.
He claims in some interviews that one can train the brain to be so. Perhaps Zazen can help us overcome many fears. Or is it genetics or some other physiological difference which wires him differently? The jury is still out.
In any case, I believe that some degree of natural fear is a good and necessary thing for all of us, keeping us from the jaws of hungry tigers or walking off cliffs. It is only fear in EXCESS (such as in PTSD cases) that is the problem.
As well, our Zen Practice can allow us to experience fear AND no fear AT ONCE (See my new book, 'Zen Master's Dance,' for more on that.)
Hmmm. While the training certainly can do much, my non-medical "gut" reaction looking at this gut twisting picture is that: his brain is just a bit unique. As a Zen fellow, I am more than willing to take the proverbial step "off a 100 foot pole," but ya ain't getting me up on that rock face!
(Sorry to run scarily long)
Gassho, J
STLah
He claims in some interviews that one can train the brain to be so. Perhaps Zazen can help us overcome many fears. Or is it genetics or some other physiological difference which wires him differently? The jury is still out.
In any case, I believe that some degree of natural fear is a good and necessary thing for all of us, keeping us from the jaws of hungry tigers or walking off cliffs. It is only fear in EXCESS (such as in PTSD cases) that is the problem.
As well, our Zen Practice can allow us to experience fear AND no fear AT ONCE (See my new book, 'Zen Master's Dance,' for more on that.)
Deep inside the brain’s medial temporal lobe lies the amygdala. It’s an almond-shaped set of neurons that for decades has been considered the “fear detector” in the brain. By showing subjects a series of images — ranging from everyday objects like furniture and landscapes to extremely rare or exciting scenes like mutilated bodies or erotic nudity — Joseph and her staff are able to get a good sense of just how risk-averse they might be, based on how much activity is observed in the amygdala.
According to Joseph, after about 45 minutes in the MRI tube, Honnold emerged saying: “What? Was that supposed to do something for me?”
“For most people,” she said, “they don’t come out traumatized, but they do come out and say it wasn’t pleasant. Alex just didn’t seem affected.”
...
Compared against the data pool Joseph already had — she had even recruited a rock climber roughly Honnold’s age to come in and go through everything he did — Honnold turned out to be twice as sensation-seeking as the average person and 20 percent higher than the average high-sensation seeker.
==================
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.”
To see if she was somehow missing something, Joseph had tried dialing down the statistical threshold. She finally found a single voxel—the smallest volume of brain matter sampled by the scanner—that had lit up in the amygdala. By that point, though, real data was indistinguishable from error. “Nowhere, at a decent threshold, was there amygdala activation,” she says.
Could the same be happening as Honnold climbs ropeless into situations that would cause almost any other person to melt down in terror? Yes, says Joseph—in fact, that’s exactly what she thinks is going on. 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 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 Marie Monfils, who heads the Monfils Fear Memory Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, Honnold’s process sounds like an almost textbook, if obviously extreme, approach to dealing with fear. Until recently, Monfils says, most psychologists believed that memories—including fear memories—became “consolidated,” or unchangeable, soon after they were acquired. In just the past 16 years, that understanding has shifted. Research has shown that every time we recall a memory, it undergoes reconsolidation, meaning we are able to add new information or a different interpretation to our remembrance, even turning fearful memories into fearless ones.
Honnold keeps a detailed climbing journal, in which he revisits his climbs and makes note of what he can do better. For his most challenging solos, he also puts a lot of time into preparation: rehearsing the moves and, later, picturing each movement in perfect execution. 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.”
...
Without going back in time to scan Honnold’s brain before he started down his own path as a free soloist, there is no way to know how much nature and how much nurture went into his fearlessness. But a few possibilities seem safe to rule out.
Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who has been studying the brain’s response to threats since the 1980s, tells me he has never heard of any person being born with a normal amygdala—as Honnold’s appears to be—that shows no sign of activation. Addressing a possibility raised by Honnold that a person could burn out his amygdala from overstimulation, LeDoux says, “I don’t think that could happen.” Still, when I describe Honnold’s total absence of amygdala activation during the scan tasks, LeDoux’s response is, “That sounds pretty impressive.”
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.”
Genetics has a clearer role in the personality traits that have helped motivate Honnold’s ropeless climbing. Sensation seeking is thought to be partly heritable, and can be passed down from parents to their children. The trait is associated with lower anxiety and a blunted response to potentially dangerous situations. One result can be a tendency to underestimate risks, which a recent study linked to an imbalance caused by low amygdala reactivity and less effective inhibition of sensation seeking by the prefrontal cortex.
Joseph’s own research doesn’t look at individual cases (she considers her scan of Honnold an “observation”), but she has noted “greatly diminished” amygdala responsiveness among some cohorts of high sensation seekers—and Honnold is a very high sensation seeker. 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.”
“He has the traits that enable him to be incredibly focused, and incredibly patient, but at the same time totally sensation seeking,” Joseph says. A single example is a long way from proving a theory, but a guy who free solos into the Death Zone, and yet goes by the nickname No Big Deal, is compelling evidence of Joseph’s super-sensation-seeker hypothesis when it comes to Honnold.
“The idea of the super sensation seeker—who is defined by having this really strong motivation to pursue these kinds of positive and thrilling experiences, but at the same time having the control and the regulation—is important. I think it could teach us a lot about potentially treating substance-abuse disorder, anxiety disorders, and coming up with strategies that people can use,” she says. “Potentially just talking with Alex, you could envision a new kind of intervention.”
For example, many high sensation seekers’ problematic behaviors involve intense experiences that can be pursued impulsively and without obvious immediate consequences, such as binge drinking or drug use. (Honnold has always avoided alcohol and drugs, and doesn’t drink coffee.) Joseph wonders if that energy could be redirected into high-arousal activities—such as rock climbing, but with protective gear—that by their nature involve constraint, premeditation, and specific goals, reinforcing different life patterns.
At the very least, it might be possible for any one of us to work a little bit of Honnold’s magic. You may not have the traits of a super sensation seeker, or be able to quench your amygdala on command, but with conscious effort and gradual, repeated exposure to what you fear, any one of us might muster courage that we didn’t know we had.
According to Joseph, after about 45 minutes in the MRI tube, Honnold emerged saying: “What? Was that supposed to do something for me?”
“For most people,” she said, “they don’t come out traumatized, but they do come out and say it wasn’t pleasant. Alex just didn’t seem affected.”
...
Compared against the data pool Joseph already had — she had even recruited a rock climber roughly Honnold’s age to come in and go through everything he did — Honnold turned out to be twice as sensation-seeking as the average person and 20 percent higher than the average high-sensation seeker.
==================
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.”
To see if she was somehow missing something, Joseph had tried dialing down the statistical threshold. She finally found a single voxel—the smallest volume of brain matter sampled by the scanner—that had lit up in the amygdala. By that point, though, real data was indistinguishable from error. “Nowhere, at a decent threshold, was there amygdala activation,” she says.
Could the same be happening as Honnold climbs ropeless into situations that would cause almost any other person to melt down in terror? Yes, says Joseph—in fact, that’s exactly what she thinks is going on. 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 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 Marie Monfils, who heads the Monfils Fear Memory Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, Honnold’s process sounds like an almost textbook, if obviously extreme, approach to dealing with fear. Until recently, Monfils says, most psychologists believed that memories—including fear memories—became “consolidated,” or unchangeable, soon after they were acquired. In just the past 16 years, that understanding has shifted. Research has shown that every time we recall a memory, it undergoes reconsolidation, meaning we are able to add new information or a different interpretation to our remembrance, even turning fearful memories into fearless ones.
Honnold keeps a detailed climbing journal, in which he revisits his climbs and makes note of what he can do better. For his most challenging solos, he also puts a lot of time into preparation: rehearsing the moves and, later, picturing each movement in perfect execution. 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.”
...
Without going back in time to scan Honnold’s brain before he started down his own path as a free soloist, there is no way to know how much nature and how much nurture went into his fearlessness. But a few possibilities seem safe to rule out.
Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who has been studying the brain’s response to threats since the 1980s, tells me he has never heard of any person being born with a normal amygdala—as Honnold’s appears to be—that shows no sign of activation. Addressing a possibility raised by Honnold that a person could burn out his amygdala from overstimulation, LeDoux says, “I don’t think that could happen.” Still, when I describe Honnold’s total absence of amygdala activation during the scan tasks, LeDoux’s response is, “That sounds pretty impressive.”
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.”
Genetics has a clearer role in the personality traits that have helped motivate Honnold’s ropeless climbing. Sensation seeking is thought to be partly heritable, and can be passed down from parents to their children. The trait is associated with lower anxiety and a blunted response to potentially dangerous situations. One result can be a tendency to underestimate risks, which a recent study linked to an imbalance caused by low amygdala reactivity and less effective inhibition of sensation seeking by the prefrontal cortex.
Joseph’s own research doesn’t look at individual cases (she considers her scan of Honnold an “observation”), but she has noted “greatly diminished” amygdala responsiveness among some cohorts of high sensation seekers—and Honnold is a very high sensation seeker. 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.”
“He has the traits that enable him to be incredibly focused, and incredibly patient, but at the same time totally sensation seeking,” Joseph says. A single example is a long way from proving a theory, but a guy who free solos into the Death Zone, and yet goes by the nickname No Big Deal, is compelling evidence of Joseph’s super-sensation-seeker hypothesis when it comes to Honnold.
“The idea of the super sensation seeker—who is defined by having this really strong motivation to pursue these kinds of positive and thrilling experiences, but at the same time having the control and the regulation—is important. I think it could teach us a lot about potentially treating substance-abuse disorder, anxiety disorders, and coming up with strategies that people can use,” she says. “Potentially just talking with Alex, you could envision a new kind of intervention.”
For example, many high sensation seekers’ problematic behaviors involve intense experiences that can be pursued impulsively and without obvious immediate consequences, such as binge drinking or drug use. (Honnold has always avoided alcohol and drugs, and doesn’t drink coffee.) Joseph wonders if that energy could be redirected into high-arousal activities—such as rock climbing, but with protective gear—that by their nature involve constraint, premeditation, and specific goals, reinforcing different life patterns.
At the very least, it might be possible for any one of us to work a little bit of Honnold’s magic. You may not have the traits of a super sensation seeker, or be able to quench your amygdala on command, but with conscious effort and gradual, repeated exposure to what you fear, any one of us might muster courage that we didn’t know we had.
Hmmm. While the training certainly can do much, my non-medical "gut" reaction looking at this gut twisting picture is that: his brain is just a bit unique. As a Zen fellow, I am more than willing to take the proverbial step "off a 100 foot pole," but ya ain't getting me up on that rock face!
(Sorry to run scarily long)
Gassho, J
STLah
Comment