Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

by Anna Lembke

Alex Honnold, now world-famous for climbing the face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes, was found to have below-normal amygdala activation during brain imaging. For most of us, the amygdala is an area of the brain that lights up in an fMRI machine when we look at scary pictures. The researchers who studied Honnold’s brain speculated that he was born with less innate fear than others, which in turn allowed him, they hypothesized, to accomplish superhuman climbing feats. But Honnold himself disagreed with their interpretation: “I’ve done so much soloing, and worked on my climbing skills so much that my comfort zone is quite large. So these things that I’m doing that look pretty outrageous, to me they seem normal.” The most likely explanation for Honnold’s brain differences is the development of tolerance to fear through neuroadaptation. My guess is that Honnold’s brain started out no different from the average brain in terms of fear sensitivity. What’s different now is that he has trained his brain through years of climbing not to react to fearful stimuli. It takes a lot more to scare Honnold’s brain than the average person’s because he has incrementally exposed himself to death-defying feats. Of note, Honnold nearly had a panic attack when he went inside the fMRI machine to get pictures taken of his “fearless brain,” which also tells us that fear tolerance doesn’t necessarily translate across all experiences.