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Comment by Florin_Andrei | Hacker News Reader

I've read an article recently - someone actually scanned Honnold's brain and it turns out his amygdala does not respond in the usual way to inputs that in most people would elicit fear. In colloquial terms, he's "fearless".

If true, that would explain a lot.

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Link for those curious:

http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-strange-brain-of-the-wor...

Apparently, meditation can reduce the size of your amygdala [1], and this reduces your fear response, so yea. I'm not saying you can become like him, but you can make some headway in that direction.

[1]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-does-mi...

Sounds like a bad idea to me. People like Alex have a pretty short life expectancy.

But what a life they lead.

Considering you and I have a 100% chance of death anyway, I see the attraction.

Oh, I agree. I guess I'm saying that if you want to live that life, that's great, go shrink your amygdala. However, if you haven't chosen that, then a smaller amygdala may not help you live a better life.

reducing the amygdala would be a win in stress and anxiety management though which would touch all aspects of life.

And that's the point. A lot of us walk around with certain fears that would be best to be put behind us. This kind of thing helps, indeed.

This stuff is not so that you'd go out there and live a life like Alex. It's more of a, face some of your own irrational fears, sort of thing.

Honnold needs the following to do what he did: Absolute fearlessness, talent (most couldn't ever do what he did even with years of practice), and discipline (to train like crazy).

People like Honnold are pretty rare.

I would also presume that from a physical perspective he must be above average in ways that matter for this sport.

Indeed. Tall, skinny, gangly, and very big hands & fingers with incredible power. Imagine doing 10 sets of reps of pulls-ups but hanging on with only one finger at a time to get an idea. As if one-arm pull-ups weren't hard enough, pinky pull-ups are on a whole different level.

Ten pull ups with one finger on only one arm?

I can't find the video I want right now, but this has some nice visuals. Check out this climber planking around 0:39.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igYhX5xyprw

maybe it was a video from magnus mitboe? https://youtu.be/BEc5uVsM6bE?t=1m33s

or the 80ies oldschool classic; wolfgang guellich in a german gameshow: https://youtu.be/rugoETlUAVI?t=22m47s

I won't call him gangly. He isn't even skinny in the sense most people assume (no muscle, stick figure).

He seems to have a lot of lean muscle (http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/06/05/ap_17155772401614...)

No? He looks gangly to me.

gangly, adj., \ˈgaŋ-glē\ : long and thin [1]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gangly

Watch the '60 Minutes' interview with him that somebody else linked to in the thread. His fingers are the size of household water pipes.

It would be rude to call him a mutant, but that's pretty much what he is, for better or worse.

He is in fact extremely lean, and his fingers have massive growths of connective tissue from all the years of thrashing up rocks dangling by his fingertips ^.^

there are actually a lot of people who can climb harder (on a rope) than alex honnold; he has done one 8c+; atm 350 people have done 9a or harder and a lot of people have done multiple 8c+ routes:

http://escalade9.wifeo.com/par-nationalite.php

i think what's so special about him are his mental abilities, not his physical.

In 2012 Alex solo'd Freerider, Watkins, and Half Dome in ~19 hours.

He completed the Fitz Traverse with Tommy, who referred to him as the greatest climber of our generation(perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but still).

He is the current speed record holder with Hans Florine for The Nose.

Alex is the top ultramarathoner of rock climbing. Not only is his endurance of effort incredibly high, he is able to continually execute moves at an extremely high level with an almost non-existent error rate. He has admitted to feeling fear, and has mentioned that he free solo's stuff he feels very comfortable with. I'm positive his AMAZING physical abilities, particularly in the area of climbing endurance, are a contributing factor to his success in this area.

It may be true that his grade is not as high as 350 other peoples, however I would say that dismissing his "physical abilities" as not so special is perhaps not so accurate.

I think it's also worth pointing out how far out on the bell curve those 350 people with comparable or greater athletic climbing skills are as well. The modern day top tier or two of climbers are athletes with Olympian levels of talent/training.

All those technically harder routes are like 50 metres high. Sure there are 350 people that could theoretically manage this climb technical skill-wise, but I'm also 100% certain none of those 350 would be able to accomplish this incredible feat endurance-wise or mentally for four hours and 1000+ meters and absolutely 0 mistakes, while I'm also certain that if Honnold puts his mind to it he will be able to climb those technically harder routes.

And: Luck (because shit happens). I don't mean for this to in any way diminish his amazing accomplishments, but no matter how well he trains and how disciplined he is, he is always one unexpected external event (failing hold, rock falling from above, just enough loose dirt) from complete failure.

I guess, but I am one external event away from dying on my drive to work too.

Sure. Just a lot less probable.

Alex only does dangerous free solos on rare occasions. He's certainly vastly more likely to die on one than the average person on the average day, but the fact that he only does it rarely is how he's still alive at all.

Nobody really knows exactly what type of risk he's taking, but my rough guess is that he's probably on the order of ~10x an average mortality rate (which is 1.5% / yr among males his age).

Whether that's insane or not is up to an individual. For me, it's a rare combination of crazy and rational, which I find fascinating.

Your average mortality rate is off by 10x. Mortality rate for a 31 year old in the United States is 104/100,000 or 0.104%/year.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/mortfinal2007_worktable23r...

Ah, so that would make my estimate ~100x. Thanks

That reminds me of a very dark joke that I heard in a bar in Canmore once.

- How do you become the greatest climber in the world?

- You become the second greatest climber and wait for #1 to die.

Someone did the same with top downhill skier Aksel Lund Svindal last year, with the same conclusion. They also attached a pinhole camera inside his goggles to study eye movements, and found that he never blinks for the full 2 1/2 minutes of a race.

I forget to blink at a healthy rate when playing unusually intense matches in certain RTS games.

Usually my eyes dry out and I end up with smeared vision and halos around light sources until the eyes regain their moisture.

I believe you are referring to this Nautilus article

http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-strange-brain-of-the-wor...

Damasio reviews evidence that people that lose the ability to feel certain emotions make worse decisions. It seemingly simply doesn't occur to them to not do dangerous things and there are cases where it leads to systematically bad decisions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

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