Photograph by Christian Adam.
In March 2016, Alex Honnold lay inside a white tube at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, while about 200 pictures flicked past his eyes at the speed of channel surfing. Corpses with their faces bloodily rearranged. Two mountain-climbing scenes. In the control room, behind leaded glass, the cognitive neuroscientist Jane Joseph asked the technician to scroll down to the amygdala. “We have to know,” she said.
A pair of almond-shaped nodes surfaced out of the gray. “He has one!”
Nautilus published that scene in August 2016, in J.B. MacKinnon’s “The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber.” It was a big article for the magazine. It was also being filmed. The crew making Free Solo was in Charleston, and a few seconds of the scan ended up in the film that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019.
John Steele is the Publisher & Executive Editor of Blue Continuum.
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