Capn'O wrote:SelbyCobra wrote:Kawhi is definitely in the same brain chemistry/on the spectrum/mental health situation that Alex Honnold is. This stuff doesn't register to him the same way it does to normal human beings. The way he responds to figure of speech questions with literal answers is exactly the same. I'd wager if he had the same brain scan that Honnold did it would show very similar results.
Being that talented AND having his brain wired that way is absolutely terrifying as a fan of a team that doesn't have Kawhi Leonard on it.
That is a great comparison. Do you climb?
Not like you want me to if I answered yes. I go casually indoors. My kids love it though, and we actually go to the gym where Honnold learned to climb and train.
Here's a little more detail for anyone curious about the difference between learning to control your fear consciously, and the sort of genetic mutation that Honnold has which allows him to operate without the same mental restrictions most other humans have. They actually used a fellow climber as the control for the experiment, and he said similar things to Honnold about not having fear or reactions, but the scans showed wildly different results internally.
http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/the-strange-brain-of-the-worlds-greatest-solo-climber“I’m excited to see what his brain looks like,” she says, sitting in the control room behind leaded glass as the scan begins. “Then we’ll just check what his amygdala is doing, to see: Does he really have no fear?”
Often referred to as the brain’s fear center, the amygdala is more precisely the center of a threat response and interpretation system. It receives information on a straight pathway from our senses, which allows us to, for example, step back from an unexpected precipice without a moment’s conscious thought, and triggers a roster of other bodily responses familiar to almost everyone: racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, tunnel vision, loss of appetite. Meanwhile, the amygdala sends information up the line for higher processing in the cortical structures of the brain, where it may be translated into the conscious emotion we call fear.
Inside the tube, Honnold is looking at a series of about 200 images that flick past at the speed of channel surfing. The photographs are meant to disturb or excite. “At least in non-Alex people, these would evoke a strong response in the amygdala,” says Joseph. “I can’t bear to look at some of them, to be honest.” The selection includes corpses with their facial features bloodily reorganized; a toilet choked with feces; a woman shaving herself, Brazilian style; and two invigorating mountain-climbing scenes.
“Maybe his amygdala is not firing—he’s having no internal reactions to these stimuli,” says Joseph. “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.”
There is also a more existential question. “Why does he do this?” she says. “He knows it’s life-threatening—I’m sure people tell him every day. So there may be some kind of really strong reward, like the thrill of it is very rewarding.”
To find out, Honnold is now running through a second experiment, the “reward task,” in the scanner. He can win or lose small amounts of money (the most he can win is $22) depending on how quickly he clicks a button when signaled. “It’s a task that we know activates the reward circuitry very strongly in the rest of us,” Joseph says.
In this case, she’s looking most closely at another brain apparatus, the nucleus accumbens, located not far from the amygdala (which is also at play in the reward circuitry) near the top of the brainstem. It is one of the principal processors of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that arouses desire and pleasure. High sensation seekers, Joseph explains, may require more stimulation than other people to get a dopamine hit.
After about half an hour, Honnold emerges from the scanner looking sleepily doe-eyed. Raised in Sacramento, California, he has a refreshingly frank manner of speaking, and an oddly contradictory demeanor that might be described as intensely laid back—his nickname is No Big Deal, which is his assessment of almost every experience he undergoes. Like most expert climbers, he is leanly muscled, more like a fitness buff than a body builder. The exceptions are his fingers, which permanently look as though they’ve just been slammed in a car door, and his forearms, which bring to mind Popeye.
“Looking at all those images—does that count as being under stress?” he asks Joseph.
“Those images that you saw are used pretty widely in the field for inducing fairly strong arousal responses,” Joseph replies.
“Because, I can’t say for sure, but I was like, whatever,” he says. The photographs, even the “gruesome burning children and stuff” struck him as dated and jaded. “It’s like looking through a curio museum.”
“What do all the brain pictures mean?” Honnold asks, looking at the brightly colored fMRI images that Joseph has sent him. “Is my brain intact?”
“Your brain’s intact,” says Joseph. “And it’s quite interesting.”
Even to the untrained eye, the reason for her interest is clear. Joseph had used a control subject—a high-sensation-seeking male rock climber of similar age to Honnold—for comparison. Like Honnold, the control subject had described the scanner tasks as utterly unstimulating. Yet in the fMRI images of the two men’s responses to the high-arousal photographs, with brain activity indicated in electric purple, the control subject’s amygdala might as well be a neon sign. Honnold’s is gray. He shows zero activation.
Flip to the scans for the monetary reward task: Once again, the control subject’s amygdala and several other brain structures “look like a Christmas tree lit up,” Joseph says. In Honnold’s brain, the only activity is in the regions that process visual input, confirming only that he had been awake and looking at the screen. The rest of his brain is in lifeless black and white.
“There’s just not much going on in my brain,” Honnold muses. “It just doesn’t do anything.”
To see if she was somehow missing something, Joseph had tried dialing down the statistical threshold. She finally found a single voxel—the smallest volume of brain matter sampled by the scanner—that had lit up in the amygdala. By that point, though, real data was indistinguishable from error. “Nowhere, at a decent threshold, was there amygdala activation,” she says.
Could the same be happening as Honnold climbs ropeless into situations that would cause almost any other person to melt down in terror? Yes, says Joseph—in fact, that’s exactly what she thinks is going on. Where there is no activation, she says, there probably is no threat response. Honnold really does have an extraordinary brain, and he really could be feeling no fear up there. None at all. None whatsoever.
Until they can get on the wall.
