The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber (2016)
nautil.us
nautil.us
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3637656/ "Too little, too late or too much, too early? Differential hemodynamics of response inhibition in high and low sensation seekers"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3150539/ "Neural Correlates of Emotional Reactivity in Sensation Seeking"
I wonder how climbers overcome this?
(Personal experience, and I'm shit, so pinch of salt.)
The difference with what you describe is that you have a time pressure - you're being passively carried into the state where you're afraid and reactions etc come in real time.
Specifically when doing free solo stuff - I have time to "override" my responses if that makes sense? It takes conscious effort but I am moving at my own pace, I can rest, take a deep breath, etc.
The world is big, and climbing is a very small part of it. The most famous climber (to other climbers) is just another guy in the supermarket line if you don’t follow climbing.
I’ve climbed a long time and have a handful of friends who I had “heard of” before meeting them. I admit it was strange at first but they always turn out to be real people with normal boring lives. I imagine its pretty tough making friends if you’re in that weird class of “super famous in this tiny niche” that climbers (and computer programmers) can find themselves in.
So I guess don’t be surprised to find that somebody here knows another rock climber. There aren’t really all that many of us!
I won't speak for anyone else, but in my experience: if you hang out with truly world-class climbers, occasionally getting through a 5.12 doesn't feel impressive at all. Nobody's trying to make you feel worse, of course, but watching someone effortlessly nail something I sweated and struggled through permanently puts my opinion of myself in a strongly-caveated place. "Elite amateur" is a label that's very difficult to self-apply because you see the people who are in the tier(s) above you and it's impossible to not make the comparison. It was pretty motivating for a while for me but I think of myself as "just okay" (even at my best) at climbing because I know how high the ceiling is.
> I won't speak for anyone else, but in my experience: if you hang out with
> truly world-class climbers, occasionally getting through a 5.12 doesn't feel
> impressive at all
But it's also true that if you poll amateur climbers, being able to consistently red-point 5.12 is rare. being able to consistently on-sight 5.12 is rarer still. I think we can say that consistently climbing 5.12 is not world-class, but it is statistically rare amongst amateurs.
Both statements are compatible. We can quibble about whether "elite" means top 1%, top .1%, top .01%, &c. But in general, 5.12 is above the gym or crag duffer level, even regular gym or crag duffers.
Occasionally getting through a 5.12 isn't consistently climbing 5.12, mind you. IMO, the only ratings that count are the grades we can consistently red-point, flash, or on-sight. I can say whatever I like about this one Red Gorge 5.12c that had a couple of dynos, but I'm tall and I used to like to dyno. The truth is that the best I ever climbed was to consistently red-point 5.11 outside, with a few flashes and on-sights along the way.
Likewise, I think I have two V5s under my belt, but I absolutely never could count on sending even a V3 in one or two tries, so I really think that I climbed about V2 consistently outside, with bunches of V3s that I projected, with the memories of a few V4s and those two V5s to sustain me though my twilight years.
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All that being said, advances in training methods and the increasing popularity of difficulty climbing and bouldering as children's sports is rapidly raising the standard of excellence.
Starting young makes as much of a difference in climbing as it does in every other sport. There's nothing quite like hitting your peak physical prowess years with a half-decade or even decade of training under your belt, and your body hasn't put on its adult weight yet.
I'd say that 5.12 is rare amongst a certain generation of climbers, but this is not for long. It will soon be common for fifteen year-olds to swarm up 5.12s in gyms, and not long after that 5.10s will be known as "That thing your parents can play with while waiting to drive you home."
The thing with climbing is that it's a combination of physical and technique. You can train your physique, but you need to be of a certain build to be one of the greatest. And technique is something you never stop improving. So being good in high school, with the right build and perseverance you could have been significantly better in your mid twenties. But it would have been at the cost of the rest of your youth.
That's the key, plus in all likelihood some niggling injuries picked up along the way which might haunt you into old age.
It was some kind of magnificent but toxic culture, very similar to surf culture, with hidden spots and tribal rivalries.
The first gym to open in Toronto carried over this tradition, but other gyms eventually opened and went with "friendlier" grades, so there can be a big discrepancy between a new gym's ratings and an old trad climb in Ontario. But newer outside routes, especially new hard sport routes, are put up by climbers with newer grade sensibilities, so the indoor and outdoor grades are consistent.
Personally, I've taken that as another aspect of the training: work on not caring about the grade.
I remember Colorado feeling similar. And Spain being the same, but with the level set to 5.13 In the Basque Country.
Here in Fontainebleau, it’s rare to see a group of road tripping euros rock up who aren’t all projecting at least 7a (V6).
I’ve also lived in Trad communities in the states where 5.10 is something you work up to over years of never falling, so I understand where you’re coming from and how it could seem strange to encounter the Other World where 5.12 is No Big Deal for the first time.
It doesn't help that all the easy rocks are completely polished and unusable after decades of usage.
There are 20,000 boulder problems here. Try as we might it’ll take a while to polish them all.
> Chris Sharma was climbing for a year before he was doing the hardest sport routes in the world, but that isn't most people.
That's true, but 5.12s are not even close to the hardest routes. They're hard, but totally manageable for a dedicated climber.
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.
Definitley a badass
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.
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?
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.
"Cultural" expectations??
Anyway, yes, this is not a double-blind statistical experiment. Then again, particularly in neuroscience, great leaps in our understanding have occurred due to single cases, see Phineas Gage
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/phineas-gage-neurosci...
Also, "stereotypes", "common sense" etc. In other words, whatever is popularly taken to be true.
You know, what the Dothraki declare as "it is known".
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.
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.
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.
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"....
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.
Except when there are accidents. Like recently on El Capitan: https://www.climbing.com/news/eye-witnesses-recount-tragic-a...
https://www.redbull.tv/video/AP-1MQAPEZX91W11/a-line-across-...
Ahem, objective hazard?
I don’t think he’s opposed to society rewarding him though —- but I also think he’s aware that society deserves to know that they aren’t responsible for his actions — so he describes publicly at great length why he does what he does and it’s clear that he would do it even if society did not reward him for it (as he did for years before becoming well known)... I think he’s a pretty positive role model all things told — and there’s much more to gain from his example than there is risk of inspiring to die of soloing those who wouldn’t otherwise be so inspired...
Honnold is also much more than a free soloist, he's an ultra endurance athlete of the highest order, he's the hardest of hard men. Athletes who dominate other sports tend to be physiological mutants, but what makes Honnold special is what is going on in his head, and I've never seen anything quite like it. Exceptional boldness won't get you very far if it isn't paired with exceptional discipline.
http://grantland.com/features/anthony-gatto-juggling-cirque-...
First, we all have bills to pay. Don’t knock someone for their chosen profession.
Second, I was lucky enough to be invited to a small group event to hear him speak. Either all or the vast majority of his fee was sent directly to a charity. Never hit his bank account.
Good rule of thumb is to remember not to make assumptions about people you know nothing about.
I stand by my statement. I'm not making assumptions, just observations. If he continues to climb for the audience he will end up dead. And they won't show that on TV, but they should, to be balanced and responsible.
And, yes, 5.11 is 'easy' but there are still hazards that are beyond his control, and 5.11 involves moves that are inherently insecure..that is what the rating means. 5.10a and above implies some level of dynamicism and/or trusting "nothing" holds or some combination thereof.
And, by the way, if he is "giving the money away" then your choice of the word "profession" is poor English.
You should take some time to read this again and ask yourself what powerful emotion powered this though to form and surface.
I really think it was obvious but given the down votes I am now assuming there is a misunderstanding somewhere.
I cannot believe for a moment that Alex Honnold doesn't get something from the attention he receives. There's something almost akin to the social taboo of watching others have sex, such as in pornography. We're not so much watching an athlete, but a psychologically notable person that allows us to vicariously experience the intimacy of emotions that arise from handing over one's very existence to the precipice.
Last thing I ever soloed.
“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?
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.
Contrast that to Alex Honnold, who does climbs for hours on end, which is more of an endurance sport than strength training. He also has a modest vegetarian diet, I don't believe he is slamming multiple chicken breasts per day like a body builder. I can't say if professional rock climbers use PED's, but they certainly are not interested in packing on extra muscle anywhere except the grip strength/forearms, which is crucial to surviving the hardest routes.
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.
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.
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?
Similar to your mental state due to other things. If you're having a bad day or distracted, your climbing will be greatly affected, sometimes severely.
"Greatest Solo Climber"