Alex Honnold transcends human ability and cognition
I have an intense fear of heights. Whenever I get too high up, I freeze, and I physically cannot move my body. Ironically, I love rock climbing, which, as one can probably assume, doesn’t meld well with a fear of heights. As much as I try, I cannot get my body to surpass the feeling of anxiety that takes over me when I look down and see how far I am from the ground. A type of rock climbing I cannot even fathom, free soloing, is done without a harness or ropes attached to the person climbing. The thought of climbing anything larger than what is in a climbing gym with a rope and harness, let alone without one, is incredible and absolutely unrealistic to me. But many climbers meticulously train for this type of climbing, one of these climbers being Alex Honnold, who I see as somewhat superhuman.
I watched Honnold’s 2017 free solo of El Capitan with my aunt, an avid rock climber, in 2020, and I was encapsulated by his ability to surpass what I believed was a cognitive human limit. In 2018, “Free Solo” was released, an Oscar-winning National Geographic documentary that followed Honnold’s preparation and free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite. Even knowing that Honnold would survive at the end, I watched the documentary on the edge of my seat, wracked with anxiety when I was not even the one climbing. Seeing Honnold pull his body weight up on even the smallest ledge is simultaneously incredible to watch and stress-vomit-inducing. But the sense of hope and happiness that I felt seeing Honnold stand over 3,000 feet in the air on the top of El Capitan and look at the vastness of the ground below him was equal to the sense of hope and humanity I felt seeing the end scene of “Superman” (2025) and gave me chills all throughout my body. I have since rewatched “Free Solo” many times, gaining endless inspiration from Honnold’s ability to conquer the impossible.
In December 2025, Honnold announced that he would be free soloing Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest buildings at 508 meters, in January 2026. On Jan. 25, after a delay due to rain, Honnold not only free soloed the building, but also had it live-streamed on Netflix in “Skyscraper Live” for viewers to watch him in almost real time. There was a 10-second delay in case the worst happened, and Honnold did fall. Of course, Honnold survived and completed yet another seemingly impossible climb in only 91 minutes. Although Honnold has been scaling rock formations for 30 years, Taipei was the first skyscraper Honnold climbed. To prepare for the climb, Honnold rigorously trained and even did a test climb of the skyscraper with the aid of ropes. Honnold’s down-to-earth and can-do attitude was summed up with the single word he uttered at the top of the 1,667-foot skyscraper: “sick.”
The reason that I freeze when I climb a little too high is that human brains are programmed to be afraid of things, which is how we stay safe. A part of the brain called the amygdala is programmed to respond to the world around us and trigger the feeling of fear when a threat is perceived. However, a test on Honnold’s brain done in 2016 revealed that he does not experience these cognitive responses as most people do. When shown images used to evoke fear, Honnold’s amygdala shows no activity; no activation compared to another person’s brain scan, which showed high amygdala activity when shown the same images. In simple terms, Honnold does not have a threat response and really could be feeling absolutely zero fear while thousands of feet in the sky with no ropes.
Honnold’s climbs truly astonish me every time, and he has blown past what I would believe was the threshold for human capability. He has trained his body to transcend anxiety and have no threat response while on the sheer edge of a rock or while hanging off the side of a building, and still holds the title of the only person to ever free solo El Capitan or Taipei 101.
Watching Alex Honnold repeatedly scale buildings and rock formations that I couldn’t even fathom a person climbing gives me so much inspiration. Even though Honnold’s brain is physically different from mine, seeing him put his mind to something so strongly makes me realize that maybe I can do the seemingly impossible things in my own life, even though those things do not involve a death-defying grip on the sheer edge of a monolith.
