Hanging By A Thread: The History, Science, Technology and Culture of Rock Climbing and Mountaineering

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In other projects Wikimedia Commons. This page was last edited on 10 September , at The verb was inspired by photographs of Honnold in precisely that position on Thank God Ledge, located 1, feet off the deck in Yosemite National Park. Honnold side-shuffled across this narrow sill of stone, heels to the wall, toes touching the void, when, in , he became the first rock climber ever to scale the sheer granite face of Half Dome alone and without a rope. Had he lost his balance, he would have fallen for 10 long seconds to his death on the ground far below. Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal, which means that, on epic days of soloing, he might spend 12 or more hours in the Death Zone.

On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. Even Honnold has said that his palms sweat when he watches himself on film. All of this has made Honnold the most famous climber in the world. He has appeared on the cover of National Geographic , on 60 Minutes , in commercials for Citibank and BMW, and in a trove of viral videos.

He also inspires no shortage of peanut-gallery commentary that something is wrong with his wiring. The audience was there to hear from climbing photographer Jimmy Chin and veteran explorer Mark Synnott, but above all they had gathered to gasp at tales about Honnold. The mirror neuron system is a network of neurons Synnott got the biggest response from a story set in Oman, where the team had traveled by sailboat to visit the remote mountains of the Musandam Peninsula, which reaches like a skeletal hand into the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Coming upon an isolated village, they went ashore to mix with the locals.

Up came the photograph for the gasp from the crowd.

There was Honnold, the same casual dude who was sitting on stage in a grey hoodie and khakis, now looking like a toy as he scaled a huge, bone-colored wall behind the town. He was alone and without a rope.

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When the Explorers Hall presentation concluded, the adventurers sat down to autograph posters. In one of them, a neurobiologist waited to share a few words with Synnott about the part of the brain that triggers fear.

O nce upon a time, Honnold tells me, he would have been afraid—his word, not mine—to have psychologists and scientists looking at his brain, probing his behavior, surveying his personality. Why ask questions about it? And so, on this morning in March, , he is laid out, sausage-roll style, inside a large, white tube at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. Months earlier, I had approached Honnold about taking a look at his much admired, much maligned brain. The cognitive neuroscientist who volunteered to carry out the scan is Jane Joseph, who in was one of the first people to perform fMRIs on high sensation seekers—people who are drawn to intense experiences and are willing to take risks to have them.

Psychologists have studied sensation seeking for decades because it often leads to out-of-control behaviors such as drug and alcohol addiction, unsafe sex, and problem gambling. In Honnold, Joseph saw the possibility of a more remarkable typology: She is also simply in awe of what Honnold can do. She had tried to watch videos of him climbing ropeless, but being a low sensation seeker herself, found them overwhelming. Does he really have no fear?

Meanwhile, the amygdala sends information up the line for higher processing in the cortical structures of the brain, where it may be translated into the conscious emotion we call fear. Medical literature includes cases of people with rare congenital conditions, such as Urbach-Wiethe disease, which damage and degrade the amygdala. One individual was comfortable standing nose-to-nose with others while making direct eye contact. At a glance, Joseph says, the apparatus seems perfectly healthy. Inside the tube, Honnold is looking at a series of about images that flick past at the speed of channel surfing.

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The photographs are meant to disturb or excite. There is also a more existential question. So there may be some kind of really strong reward, like the thrill of it is very rewarding. It is one of the principal processors of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that arouses desire and pleasure.

High sensation seekers, Joseph explains, may require more stimulation than other people to get a dopamine hit. After about half an hour, Honnold emerges from the scanner looking sleepily doe-eyed. Raised in Sacramento, California, he has a refreshingly frank manner of speaking, and an oddly contradictory demeanor that might be described as intensely laid back—his nickname is No Big Deal, which is his assessment of almost every experience he undergoes.

Like most expert climbers, he is leanly muscled, more like a fitness buff than a body builder.

An Exploration of Risk

Unusually for Honnold, his voice betrays tiredness and even stress. He suffered compression fractures in two vertebrae. It was the most serious accident of his rock climbing life, and it came while he was tied into a rope. 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. He shows zero activation. Flip to the scans for the monetary reward task: The rest of his brain is in lifeless black and white. 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. Could the same be happening as Honnold climbs ropeless into situations that would cause almost any other person to melt down in terror?

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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. H onnold has always rejected the idea that he is fearless. To the wider world, he is known as a figure of preternatural calm as he hangs by his fingertips on the fine line between life and death. No one was watching, though, more than a decade ago, when he was 19 years old, standing at the base of his first major ropeless rock climb:

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