A colleague recommended "Free Solo" to me a few years back. There was this part where the doctors claim (paraphrasing) his brain is unique in that he is much less afraid of danger than us.
The part towards the end, where he does the actual climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, is also worth watching.
I find rock climbing or other sort of "adventurist" movies like that really enjoyable and interesting. If you haven't seen it The Dawn Wall was also pretty good and features Honnold at one point. It's not free soloing but it's interesting in other ways.
There is a 4+ minute Youtube clip that includes the central climbing scenes from "Free Solo" [0].
Amazing guy. The National Geographic documentary had Hollywood-esque layers that slightly annoyed me (ominous music etc), though. A documentary by Werner Herzog about Alex Honnold would be fascinating; something in the vein of his 1974 "The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner" [1,2]. I would have loved to see more of the philosophical, introspective side of Alex Honnold in the NG movie. In case of Herzog's ski jumper Walter Steiner, it was very much there.
Herzog doc about honnold would be dope. Honnold actually reminds me of Grizzly Man in alot of ways- in that you root for him but don't totally understand him. Interesting to think about whether Grizzly Man was more or less naive than Honnold- I think that's what makes them different. Honnold knows the risk he's taking, Grizzly Man didn't.
> There was this part where the doctors claim (paraphrasing) his brain is unique in that he is much less afraid of danger than us.
I'm very skeptical of that claim. It seems just as reasonable that he has a perfectly normal brain that is exactly as afraid of things as the rest of ours, but he's spent a lot of time doing terrifying things and has learned to suppress how his body reacts to it.
you can find his brain scans and see that his visual to amygdala connecting path is activated significantly less than for normal people (which in other words is "much less afraid of danger"). It is a question though whether it is a result of training or an original anatomy.
Nope. Tons of climbers climb as hard, and scary things as he does, in fact much harder he wouldn't be able to climb, probably ever.
He doesn't behave the same, where normal climbers would freak out and do a fatal mistake he repeatedly remains calm as on sunday tea party. You can train some resistance to fear of death and indeed all climbers do (myself included), but almost everybody hits some wall within their current skills. His wall is way further than almost any other climber. Not that he is the only soloist, far from it.
Alex put a lot of effort into this feat, which as far as I'm aware no one else ever seriously even attempted to train for. Listening to him speak it is obvious that he has closer relationship with his own mortality than most people, even other extreme sports enthusiasts. I think it is too convenient to look at someone like Alex and try to attribute their accomplishments to them being a freak of nature in some way, as opposed to being a normal person who just dedicated themselves to the problem more than anyone else, not to mention that it is doubtful our understanding of neurology is even good enough to make such claims in the first place, so I remain skeptical.
If you listen to interviews with Honnold, he’s very clear about the fact that he still feels fear. If you watch the clip of his first free solo of Half Dome, you can even see him have a little freakout moment standing on one of the ledges during the climb.
The only abnormal thing about his brain scan was that his amygdala activated less than usual when he looked at frightening or disturbing images, which would be entirely compatible with deliberate desensitization (perhaps through ~20 years of practicing climbing with no protection?)
I had the additional context of knowing he was already dead going into it (there's a crag in Squamish named in tribute to him).
What I didn't expect was that he died on a non-solo climb he was doing, while descending, in an avalanche. Which is the same risk any high-altitude alpinist takes.
Less fear would normally be associated with greater casual risk taking.
Given his incredibly rigorous training and laborious and meticulous preparation (years!) for the ascent beforehand, what looks like risk to us is probably as much experience to him. The connections to his amygdala don't seem to have had impact on rational thinking.
The part towards the end, where he does the actual climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, is also worth watching.