A terrifying story is a safe space

Story allows us to practice facing danger

Spring 2019: Every Sunday night, my parents come to dinner. We drink a beer and discuss the week, eat homemade comfort food, and then settle down in the living room to watch something together over dessert. Tonight it’s Free Solo, which has just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The film follows rock climber Alex Honnold’s effort to scale the sheer 900 meter face of Yosemite’s El Capitan — without a partner, without a rope system, with nothing but his body and a bag of chalk. Normally, the Sunday night watching is a very mellow affair — we slump into the cushions, stuffed to the point of torpor, and we pass a pleasant hour in the special familial languor of the shared screen. Not tonight.

Tonight, we are upright and alert. Our butts balance on the edge of our seats. My father leans forward, arms braced on knees, to get closer to the screen. My mother slides her glasses on so she can see better. We frown and worry and squirm as Alex climbs. If he falls, that’s it. Certain death on the rocks below. We know he doesn’t fall, of course, because we just saw him accept an Academy Award, but we also don’t know. If the fairly new, thinking part of our brain reminds us that we know how this turns out, the much older part of our brain that reacts to danger is treating this as a moment of very real danger indeed. It’s hard to watch, but it’s impossible to turn away.

Alex moves slowly and steadily upward, feeling with his fingers and feet for tiny protrusions, declivities, texture — anything he can grip, anything that can hold his weight. He is beautiful to watch. There is something epic and profound about his ascent. He is also unnerving. He is as calm as we are not. We are more worried about him than he is about himself. How is he doing that? Not just physically, but mentally?

The filmmakers — experienced climbers themselves — wondered the same thing. So they asked cognitive neuroscientist Jane Joseph, who studies the brains of thrill-seekers, to take a look at Alex’s brain. Dr. Joseph put Alex in an fMRI machine, showed him a couple hundred provocative images — mutilated corpses, a toilet brimming with shit, that sort of thing — and waited for his brain to react. It didn’t. When other climbers were exposed to the same images, their amygdala — the almond-shaped threat-detection center buried deep in the heart of the brain — was instantly and powerfully activated. Alex’s was unimpressed.

Left: Honnold’s brain. Right: brain of a fellow rock climber. The amygdala sits at the intersection of the two lines. Source.

An activated amygdala initiates a series of reactions to prepare for fight or flight. Stress hormones flood the body, and the sympathetic nervous system comes online. Muscles tense. Pupils dilate. The heart races and breathing quickens. None of this happened with Alex. His amygdala was unmoved by the provocative images it had just been shown. It might as well have been asleep.

Alex is quick to clarify that he is not immune to fear — he was quite fearful when he first began climbing, and still has his moments. He speculates that over the years he has either trained his amygdala to be calm during danger, or that he has just plain worn it out. Either way, we now know why Alex could scale El Cap without the fear and trembling that normally accompany moments of extreme risk: his brain simply does not react to dangerous stimuli the way most brains do. Meanwhile, my folks and I experienced a marked, vicarious threat response as we watched the film, even though we already knew Alex made it safely to the top. Our amygdalas were more engaged than his was. We were fearing falling for him. So was Dr. Joseph, who confessed that she found footage of Alex’s free solo ascents overwhelming and had to look away.

Humans have two inborn fears: loud sounds and fear of falling. All the others — snakes, spiders, bats (a big one for me), the dark — are learned. Very young babies instinctively understand what a cliff is and avoid anything that looks like an edge with a sharp drop. Free Solo taps into our hardwired fear of falling, igniting our threat response while mesmerizing us with the spectacle of someone who can override his own amygdala with apparent ease — and use that skill to accomplish incredible things. That is the true power of this film, and of story more generally.

Storytelling creates a safe space for encountering threatening situations. It allows us to practice experiencing the hard emotions that come with danger, and it shows us that we can not only survive danger, but can even be made stronger by it. This is what bestselling author Lisa Cron means when she calls story “the world’s first virtual reality." Story is a tremendous survival mechanism, a way of enlarging our experience, understanding, and tolerance without undertaking real-world risk.

In Free Solo, the story of Alex Honnold allows us to glimpse a mindset that is absolutely unperturbed by the very real possibility of sudden, violent death. Alex’s fearlessness is compelling in part because it is so alien. Most of us are in fear much of the time. And it doesn’t take a 3,600 foot sheer rock face or the prospect of falling to our death to get our amygdalas activated. All it takes, is someone disagreeing with us. All is takes is the fear of being wrong.

I’ll have much more to say about that in my next post.