Alex Honnold discusses fear with psychology researcher Armita Golkar - Nobel Week Dialogue 2019

welcome to our meet a gold card and to Alex Honnold we are going to talk about fear and from different perspectives I would say that you are both explorers you are meta explores human emotional learning as a research in psychology and you Alex explores physical and mental capacity when when you when you climb I meter what is the best thing with being a researcher within psychology well I would say first on a general reason perhaps is it's an opportunity to kind of direct that curiosity that we talked about all day into something that I can see the product of and curiosity I mean it's it's a basic almost drive that we humans have and research enables us to to direct it and also be creative in in looking at the products that we create but at the same time I think the fact that I can say that my job is to be uncertain it's also quite nice because it's it's okay to express uncertainty about things as a researcher although I agree that mostly people view us as experts with all the answers but that's I would say my job is to reduce uncertainty that's exactly what I do and and I love it and the fact that it's psychology is just the more specific way of saying that my curiosity deals with understanding human behavior and that's where it started more questions than answers always more questions than answers yeah that's that's part of the game yeah Alex what is it that you like where the climbing I mean so I think my love of climbing stems more from the actual with the physical act to the sensation of it the feeling of moving upward I think I shout of my curiosity is anybody here climb amen oh my god yeah okay well so everybody here already knows what so great about climbing I mean I think that the actual the the feeling of it basically the movement the flow whatever you want to call it yeah I mean that looks fun yeah looks fun yeah but then I think beyond that there's also the I mean honestly the curiosity about the unknown the the pushing around limits the discovering what you're capable of or or maybe one of the most satisfying things and climbing for me is the the feeling of improvement you know taking something that seemed impossible before and then working hard toward and eventually being able to do it I think that's slow gradual improvement is one of the most satisfying aspects of climbing to me and and it looks amazing even even so it is dangerous how how how do you how do you look upon danger connected to what you do well so when you say it's dangerous I would say that it has consequence you know there are you know some climbing is more dangerous than other types um you know basically there's this whole array of risk and danger and consequence and it depends on the exact circumstances of what's going on I just I'm distracted by the photo or something like that actually that is actually the most dangerous difficult everything about that is the most challenging part of that specific route so in this particular case that photo does in capture everything that that that you think that free soloing is but what I'm doing in that photo is is maybe the the four hardest meters of the entire 900 meter wall and so of those other of the 900 meters 200 meters of it is relatively easy in that I wouldn't call dangerous that I could do anytime recreationally I could you know it's it's it's a pleasure but then you know four meters of it is incredibly hard and you know arguably dangerous but it's a spectrum and I think that a normal life you know everything we do has a spectrum of risk like that as well you know every time you get in a car there is danger involved that there is risk there is uncertainty I mean every time you step out your front door there is uncertainty and I totally agree I think it's an important important aspect of it too quite I mean think about the fact that we make all these decisions on everyday basis that are typically full of not just risk but uncertainty more than anything and traffic and trusting other people I mean you don't have any control really sitting in a car what everyone else is going to do in that traffic situation the reason why we don't think that is as extreme even if it would be deadly outcome because in your case it's such an extreme case of its 100% that the outcome if you fall a traffic accident could be potentially deadly there are the situations that are as dangerous I mean in terms of the consequences being deadly but we we are used to them because they're so frequent so we don't really pay attention to the risks and uncertainties in everyday life because they are frequent enough so we kind of adapt to the fact that it's normal and everyone else is doing it which makes us kind of devalue the risks and uncertainties associated with traveling in a car or other choices the biggest perhaps most uncertain choice that we most grown-ups do is having a child it's full of uncertainty in terms of the responsibility what's gonna happen are they going to survive it's it's a lot of emotional and very very I would say concrete risks and uncertainties surrounding that single decision still we do it and it's very common and it seems like a reasonable thing to do and we don't think about the consequences of exactly what does this mean and there I think if it's you you need to think about it that way that the frequent or common behaviors are things that we get used to and that we don't evaluate in the same way while your actions are the extreme of being very rare and something no one else does and therefore we pay more attention to the actual dangers involved even if there are other differences of course sir so that's why we are perhaps more scared of getting into an airplane than into a car because the statistics would kind of prove the other way around of course and there I think the consequence of if the if the plane crashes there's like kind of almost a hundred percent chance more possibility that I would die while not a hundred but yes very high enough which which returned to overweight yeah but but I think it's it's worth thinking about how many actions and decisions we take each day that are surrounded by uncertainty and risk in that we don't make such a big thing about may I add something just talking about risk and and that kind of uncertainty I think that you know when you look at free salt line you look at the rock climbing it seems so crazy but that is risk that's fully chosen and appreciated and then mitigated as much as I can and I think that the real danger in life is when you're taking risks without thinking about it which when we talk about driving we talk about so many other aspects of normal life and so a comparison that I like to throw out is a you know when people go partying on the weekends like they go drink on Friday night and then they drive home and they're like oh it's not that big a risk I do it every weekend it's fine we're sort of like when you start taking uncalculated risks like that that's when you're really just rolling the dice and you know even though rock climbing or free soloing might look much more extreme those are risks that I've thought about for a very long time I've prepared for I've trained for and then I've chosen them intentionally and and executed them as well as I can you know it's really different than just going out on a Saturday night getting a little incapacitated and then hoping for the best and I think that you have more control and and I mean in terms of like the mastering of what you do then we have in many other situations in life when I try things that I have not over trained or know almost by heart as you do after that much that amount of training and that I don't know less about but I still choose to do so it's quite different but but yeah and that's interesting because so we we have all these risks and and some of them we fear some of them we kind of are attracted to how would you how would you describe fear as as the phenomenon as it is how do you describe it I think fear there are two two things that I think goes in there the first thing is in terms of definitions of what fear is is both an adaptive survival response to a threat or to a predictor of danger or threat that's the most basic and fundamental property that I would describe in terms of like what fear is and that's something we need in order to survive and to basically avoid harm and all animals do that's the other part of it is the subjective experiences the conscious feelings we have when we say I'm afraid usually we think that these two things go together that we react fearfully or that the fear response is something that always comes together with the feeling of also being afraid but not particularly so and and these are two quite they're not I'm not saying they're not related I'm just saying that one thing doesn't necessarily cause the other and the sense of mastery and control and knowing what you're doing where knowledge in general can modify these feelings of course which in turn can modify these more fundamental properties of the fear response that's elicited in different ways and it's important to keep in mind that they're not the same thing and the easiest way to do that is perhaps to see that the adaptive survival response to those properties of fear they are prevalent and present in all animals they wouldn't survive if they couldn't predict the dangers that they meet but I would still argue that not all animals are subjectively and consciously aware of those feelings that we humans also have and that can be triggered by not just external threats but internally generated thoughts that could scare me but not necessarily evoke a response so it's a complicated it's it's nice to hear you explain it that way because I you know I have no technical knowledge about fear except that I've spent a lot of time being very afraid and so when when I talk about fear I always frame it in exactly the same way where there's actual rational fear that makes sense because it's your body responding to danger and then the the perceived you know just the felt fear and and I think that the challenge in you know a situation like rock climbing is being able to differentiate between the two and know which to heat and which to ignore but now yeah I always talk about it in exactly those terms it's really nice to hear an expert actually say it the right way oh my god that's good so could could you say that we actually could find it less fearsome to take a risk than to live in uncertainty in in many ways yes and if you if you break it down to some kind of definition of what risk is compared to uncertainty I would say that usually we conceptualize risk as situations during which we know the outcomes and we also know the probabilities of the outcome like playing the roulette or something that's a risk there are many more known features to risk them to uncertainty uncertainty would be a situation where a potentially know the outcome it could be I die but the probabilities are unknown and that poses a greater challenge to us as humans and I think I both agree and to some extent disagree with the previous talks we had about what uncertainty means to us in the term in in the way that I think we should embrace it and the fact that yes in some situations we like uncertainty we had examples of not wanting to know what you get Christmas or there are many many examples because I think the fact that what's fostering this liking is curiosity right we also have we are curious people or animals and we sometimes prefer not knowing but what really drives curiosity in itself is the fact that we don't like not knowing it's aversive - you must do not know and that kind of also then Foster's the curiosity because it's a means to reduce the uncertainty that's basically what we want to do and you do reduce uncertainty all the time by practicing by doing that repeatedly so you know the routine so you can take a 400-meter stretch down to four meters of really uncertain while the rest is kind of something you can do by heart or while sleeping or whatever there are examples and and I think if we just acknowledge the fact that uncertainty is something that we innately don't like it's aversive to us then we can also see the benefits of that motivation of wanting to find out because it does yield curiosity and exploration and all those other things and when we like uncertainty and choose is usually when there is either not too much at stake or we are so much in control but when we don't have the knowledge we don't feel we have control and there is a lot of things at stake we typically don't like uncertainty can you relate yeah I understand relate I mean there's certainly moments in climbing when it all goes bad and that's exactly what you're describing I mean yeah I mean for free so long as it's best when you do have an element of control when you've prepared or or you're at least confident your abilities but basically if if it all starts to go sideways and you're not confident you don't know what you're doing it gets quite scary I mean that's exactly when you're having a bad experience and you don't want to be up there and I've certainly had that occur many times but that's what you're trying to avoid yeah how do you prepare for surprises in what you do well so yeah how do you prepare for the end for the unknown I don't know I mean so I think for me it's about just having a wide range of preparations just a wide range of experience and just and then you know what to build uh you know build a broad comfort zone basically so that anything unforeseen we'll still hopefully fall within your comfort zone to some extent I mean I think that for me anyway with climbing I've consistently pushed myself in slightly different directions I suppose you know where you sort of if you think if your comfort zone is a bubble just slowly pushing it in little directions in each each way and then eventually it winds up with a pretty big bubble and then all you can really do is hope that that whatever your objective is will still fit within your bubble so preparation and knowledge is kind of the weapon or the tool we have against uncertainty and and perhaps fear then and its existence yeah and I think within preparation would fall you know visualization is sort of a subcategory of imagining things that are otherwise unpractical I mean particularly in the case of free soloing something where you're going to do a big climb once and probably only once so you can't exactly practice it in the conventional sense the word because it's something that's only gonna occur one time but thankfully you know as humans we can imagine we can project ourselves and you know forward and backward Tommy you know you can think through the movements you can even imagine the sensations like what it will feel like under your skin and so you can kind of experience that climb many times without why last only doing it once that's interesting because that's also what you said when when you said that for example having a child how so many the complexity of it when it comes to risks but maybe that's because you can't imagine it you can't visualize it in the same way as something very concrete like climbing don't you think I mean you could visualize pregnancy I mean you can write anything I think it still helps and the fact that it's something that's quite common then you also use other people's experiences of like they have children I sometimes have to relate in fact that my mother said why survive having all the worries about what I did so I'm probably gonna survive with my anxieties and worries about what's gonna happen to my children once I I mean with all the different stages of life that they're gonna go through and those are examples that I can use to kind of seek comfort but I can also imagine and visualize how the future is going to be which is kind of the gifts of being human that the fact that we can and it and it also comes to this like wanting to reduce uncertainty is because we want to predict the future that's kind of what what the whole thing is about trying to gather information to be able to predict what's gonna happen and as humans we can project ourselves as you say both backwards but also forward in time and and imagine all the things that could happen in both a good and a bad way I mean it also fosters the ability to project into the future everything bad that could potentially happen which all often gives rise to worry and anxiety like all the impossible but it's still an important part of preparation exactly I mean you have to think about the downsides if you're also anything about the good sides so that's something that you can is still some kind of like information in that sense that you can also prepare them or do all that those things that could happen doesn't necessarily have to happen but could and in within the normal range of human functioning that's that still it's a type of practice as you say unless it becomes pathological and all I can think of is their worst case scenarios for everything in life but that's kind of the extreme which is there in different forms of anxiety disorders and and so it's not that it doesn't happen but within the normal range it's it's it's a gift but you must meet you you must come across so much fear from others in what you do how do you deal with that do you to some extent it doesn't really matter you know I mean I mean it's true I mean people can can be as scared as they want but ultimately it doesn't change the likelihood of me falling off it doesn't change the consequences of me falling off I mean no matter how scared everybody else is it doesn't change whether or not I can't actually do the thing that I'm setting out to do so to some extent you just set it all aside but obviously when your friends are really scared for you you know I value their opinions and and certainly my peers you know other professional climbers if some of the people whose opinions I really respect or horrified for me that I'm like well maybe I'll rethink it you know but at a certain point only I can know how prepared I am how I feel for it and and other people's you know opinions don't really matter at that point you know as much as you want to say that you take your family into account and all that kind of stuff I mean it's you know it's true a little bit but ultimately nobody else has put that kind of time and preparation energy into it so I mean they don't really have an informed opinion on it which you know so if I watch a video of big-wave surfing let's say like I don't like swimming I don't like going in the ocean I've never served I see a video of somebody surfing you know a 20 meter wave and I'm like that is completely insane that guy must have a death wish that's so scary that's crazy you know and obviously that's the experience that most people have when they watch free soloing and it's because not that many people have experience with with climbing except everybody in this room who turns out to be a climber but um but most people don't have that much experience with free soloing and so they looking and like that's totally insane you know and I feel the same way about things that I don't know much about but ultimately you just have to trust that that the person engaging in that behavior has properly prepared for it and is prepared for you know we had climbers here in the audience if you have a question think about it because we can spare some minutes and you can let you in yeah so yeah I think there is a microphone somewhere as for you to scream at us scream yeah yeah so I mean we were sort of saying I definitely visualize the negative as much as the positive I spent a lot of time I mean so sometime visualizing the actual mechanics of what would happen if my foot slipped or something you're like you know at the photo that was shown a minute ago that was the boulder problem on the free-rider it's the hardest part you know I imagine a lot like oh if my left foot slipped I'd probably pinwheel off the wall I'd wrote it to the left I'd bounce off the ledge below I'd maybe hit this other ledge that's 150 meters lower but then either way I'm gonna die and then you go to the ground you know so I mean yeah I definitely thought through every position on the wall I go if I slipped there I would just slide all the way down this 100 meter slab you know things like that I mean it would all be a disaster but it's important for me to think about those kinds of things ahead of time so that when I'm doing the actual climb it doesn't occur to me for the first time like oh no what if my foot slipped you know I've already thought I know what'll happen with my foot slips and when it frickin it's gonna be terrible and I'm gonna die but I've already thought about it you know I think for me the the negative visualization is important to do ahead of time just so that in the actual moment it doesn't come up for the first time but you know I mean the positive visualization is easy because you just think like oh I'm gonna feel great and I'm holding out of these holes the climbing is gonna feel fluid and beautiful and fun it's gonna be this incredible experience but I think you know it's important to balance that against the negative visualization with the you know what does happen if or or even not the actual visualization of fall into your death but the visualize imagining what it would feel like to get into a position and and suddenly hesitate or you know worry that your foots kind of going to slip you know basically just to think through all those anxieties ahead of time so they're less likely to occur when it matters question okay okay there's what ideas run the mic oh oh there's no this guy's gonna do a stair workout he's just gonna run up and down as fast and just like a lot of people here I am both scientists and a climber so this is a question for both of you guys what do you think is the biggest enemy of fear the biggest enemy yeah like the biggest enemy to destroy or at least to push it up a bit I don't know you mean the biggest enemy how would you how what emotion like honey five fear like way yeah like name one emotion that you think is the opposite of like one of the best solutions of fight fear so the question is how to combat fear then right or emotion that you can that you can so I mean I will take a shot at this I mean so I actually don't really think that that I combat fear with an emotion I think that if anything if I'm trying to work with fear I I mean one sort of trick is to sort of reframe it as excitement you know you take sort of fear nervousness or whatever and you just sort of shifted a little bit in your head - oh I'm so excited for this this thing that I'm about to do I mean I certainly think that that's the case with with public speaking or a lot of other things like that where you're standing backstage and you're like all I'm a little bit afraid then you're like no no I'm not afraid I'm just excited because honestly they feel almost the same within your body and so it's pretty easy just to shift mentally but um other than that though I don't really think there is an emotional or I don't think I personally have I agree but I think it's sound simple and not that spectacular but I think still the fact that what the combat are fearful or fearful experiences with is actually safe experiences but that's the only thing you can do instead of having another emotion to combat it so if I that the part where practice comes in for you is is actually a way to acquire a lot of safe experiences of the situation that otherwise seems very threatening or dangerous and those safe experiences will teach you something it's like it's like your equipment accumulating knowledge about the fact that this is not famous this is contradicting the intuitive sense of something being threatening and that principle of acquiring safe experiences applies to all other things that we do and the fact that we are surrounded by mostly safe experiences on their everyday basis also explains why we can do all these sometimes dangerous things because we know that traveling in traffic is almost always safe that's the experience I have and that's the experience that almost everyone I know also have which transmits to me concepts conceptualize our thinking about traveling traffic as a safe thing but really if you just look at what you're doing it seems very threatening and you could also or dangerous you could explain it to someone else who never seen traffic you know in a big city and like whoa you're useless idle are you really gonna go they but you don't even know the bus driver what they are the bomb you're trusting all the strangers it's all those strangers that you trust and so on and so I think the safe experiences is kind of the only way to combat this sense of this is potentially dangerous it's also the principle that is used in clinical practice when we treat fear and anxiety and threat related disorders is exposure exposing the patient to basically safe experiences of what they otherwise fear or worry about so it's kind of it's a simple but very potent medicine if you want to put it that way mm-hmm do you ever have a last question I have a question over here I'm sorry so it's I'm wondering about your state of mind while climbing do you enter flow or are you constantly like analyzing every move or are you able to I don't know I'm sure you heard of the state yeah so yeah definitely the idea was to enter a state of flow I mean I don't really I don't really like the word flow and I you know but I mean I have read the books and and I suppose that is technically what what's occurring but you know I sort of prefer to think of it as sort of automated or you know autopilot whatever you want to call it but just performing or executing the climb without thinking much about it and I mean I think that's kind of what I've been touching on with all the visualization and the practice is is in order to make sure that I've done everything I need so that I don't have to think about anything on the actual climb so when I'm climbing I can just do the climb and think of nothing else that's that's the idea anyway you know of course they're moments where where you're like wait which end or you know depending on the route but the title of the this discussion is called to fear or not to fear Shakespeare inspired so we do have a choice in in many situations I would say yes definitely we're not the one with with fears in that sense we're born we have an innate system to detect and respond to potential threats and mostly predictors of threats but not that hardwired as most other animals are in terms of knowing what to fear or what situations are potentially dangerous we learned that is that true it is otherwise I would have to say yeah so we're we're less hardwired to experience fewer animals I mean we were less hardwired to fear specific objects or situations that would be innate like if you compare a cat and rodents for instance rodents fear cats instinctively they don't have to learn in the same way that cats are potentially dangerous or predators what they lose with that kind of very fast responding fear system or threat system is flexibility which we have as humans we don't have that kind of hardwired of course wired to detect and respond to the predictors of threat but we have to learn what those are and that allows a lot of flexibility in terms of adoption to environments that could change perhaps cats are not no longer a predator or whatever in in the human mind this flexibility is basically the key to how we can adapt to so many different environments with so many challenges in it so yes we have a choice we can choose but we need experience and we need safe experiences and we need of course mistakes where we learn that some things are truly dangerous it can't be a lethal experience of course because then we're out chances but mostly we retry Alfea by trial and error by and obviously by learning from others and the accumulated knowledge from generations passed on to us are formed from experience that's basically what we do we adapted world by learning about it and for that to happen we need to make mistakes and we need to take them risks and also enter uncertainty all the time otherwise we wouldn't find out something new a new experience that cured in foremost informatin a new way unfortunately we're running out of time thank you so much a warm hand to our meter and to Alex thank you [Applause]

Channel: Nobel Prize

Views: 1,386,474

Keywords: alex honnold, fear, risk, psychology, free solo, rock climbing, nobel prize, noble prize

Id: nq9ZAGqvmfY

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019