Alex Honnold is basically the face of doing something your brain is supposed to stop you from doing. He’s a professional climber who made his name free soloing, climbing massive rock faces with no rope, no harness, nothing to catch him if he slips. It’s not a stunt, it’s not a one-time thing; it’s what he’s built his career on.

Most people know him from the National Geographic documentary Free Solo, where he climbs the historic El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. The climb had never been done without ropes before, which, yeah there’s a reason for that. It’s about 3,000 feet of sheer granite, and he completed the whole thing in under four hours, completely alone, with no safety net. Watching it feels wrong the entire time, like your brain is trying to convince you to turn it off because it knows one mistake is the end. More recently, he showed up at a Netflix live event and successfully free-soloed the 101-story, 508-meter Taipei 101, as if he just needed a quick workout before breakfast.

A big reason he’s able to do this without looking panicked comes down to how he processes fear. Neuroscientist Jane Joseph put Honnold in an fMRI machine and found that his amygdala, the brain region responsible for fear, barely activates compared to the average person. Researchers showed him images meant to trigger a fear response, like snakes, heights, and other panic-inducing scenarios. While most people’s brains light up like a Christmas tree, his stayed relatively quiet. Other researchers, such as Joseph LeDoux, who study fear, explain that repeated exposure can dull that response over time. In Honnold’s case, it seems to be a mix of nature and nurture: his brain just doesn’t react the way most people’s do, and years of methodical practice have refined that lack of fear into something almost surgical. He’s essentially trained the part of his brain that usually screams “don’t do that” to the point where that signal is muted, allowing him to focus entirely on precision and movement instead of panic.

It also helps that he’s extremely methodical about everything leading up to a climb. He’ll practice routes over and over with ropes until every movement is locked in. By the time he goes without one, he’s not figuring it out as he goes; he already knows exactly what he’s going to do. Every handhold, every foot placement, even the pacing of his breathing is mapped out ahead of time, leaving as little as possible to chance.

But it’s still hard to fully wrap your head around someone who can hang thousands of feet in the air and stay that calm. For most people, that situation flips every internal alarm possible. For him, it barely registers. That’s probably the only reason any of this is even possible, and also why it feels so unnatural to watch. Because it is.

Mission Tracker: https://artemistracker.com/

On April 1st, NASA lit the fuse on the next chapter of getting humans back to the Moon with the launch of Artemis II. This is the first crewed mission in the Artemis program, sending astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft on a trip around the Moon and back, no landing, just a high-speed lap to prove everything works with humans on board. The massive Space Launch System rocket pushed the crew out of Earth’s gravity well, setting them on a trajectory that swings them around the far side of the Moon before slingshotting them back home. It’s essentially a dress rehearsal for putting boots back on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The mission is all about testing—life support systems, navigation, communication delays, and how humans handle deep-space travel again after decades stuck in low Earth orbit. It’s also a reminder that space travel is still one of the hardest things humans attempt; everything has to work perfectly, or things go sideways fast. If Artemis II goes smoothly, it clears the path for Artemis III, which is expected to actually land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole.