Just over a year before Alex Honnold rocked the sporting world with his historic ascent of El Capitan – the near vertical 884m-high wall of rock in Yosemite National Park – without any safety ropes or harnesses, the California-born climber lay silently in a large white tube at the Medical University of South Carolina. It was March 2016 and Honnold had agreed to undergo a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan in order to discover the answer to a simple question: ‘Am I normal?’
Honnold – the son of two community college teachers, who likes reading classic literature and eating vegan food – certainly felt pretty normal. But climbers, neuroscientists, psychologists, awestruck fans and Honnold himself were keen to know whether the brain of someone who enjoys free solo climbing – the outrageously hazardous rope-free genre of climbing – felt the same raw, nerve-scraping fear as the rest of us. Does Honnold’s amygdala – the region of the brain responsible for processing fear – light up in scary situations? Or
