Alex Honnold

But, you know, that's all learned.

With that particular scanning in the fMRI, they show you a bunch of black and white pictures, and it's like whether or not that triggers the fear response.

And I was like, well, obviously looking at pictures isn't going to trigger my fear response.

But I'm like, had they thrown a snake into the fMRI with me, that would have triggered my fear response.

If there were giant spiders crawling over me, that probably would too.

And so I was like, no, obviously I feel fear.

I just, I'm just not afraid of black and white photos.

Right.

That's what they used?

It wasn't even faces.

It was like random stuff, like, I don't know, like a gun and then like a light socket, you know, some things that are like neutral, some things that are whatever.

Well, I think it was a standardized thing, I think.

Yeah, totally, than in VR.

But this is, I think, one of the real values of climbing is I think that as a climber you spend all your time thinking about risk and managing risk and mitigating risk and all those kinds of things.

And so I think that, I don't want to like toot my own horn too much, but I do feel good at evaluating risks like that.

You know, like what is the actual dangerous thing?

Like what's sketchy about the situation?

And it just often isn't the thing that people are looking at.

You know, and that's what I was talking about earlier with like people watching video free-soling or whatever else.

They're like, that's sketchy.