Stuff Your Brain Likes

If you concentrate hard enough, it might be possible.

Anyway, that’s probably what Dean Potter believes and, from time-to-time he comes close to living that dream.

Dean Potter is probably one of the world’s best climbers but also one of the most daring.

For example he recently walked a tightrope, barefoot, over a 900 foot drop between the ledges over Hell Roaring Canyon in Moab, Utah. Without a tether. No leash. No net.

Check out this remarkable story in the New York Times – particularly the dramatic photos of Potter on the tightrope.

He’s longing for avian flight, not as a birdman in a nylon wing suit or squirrel suit, which he had tried, but as a soloist who could jump off a cliff in a way that he does not yet understand, with a strength and concentration that he does not yet possess, and simply fly.

Six years ago, he became the first person to free climb El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.

Both of them in less than 24 hours.

To do accomplish that speed, he used ropes only for protection in case he fell, climbing only with his hands and feet for a vertical mile.

Your average weekend climber could take two weeks to make that ascent.

In 2001, Potter climbed the famous Nose route on El Capitan, a 3,000-foot vertical wall with a fierce overhang, in 3 hours 24 minutes.

Compare that to Warren J. Harding, a renowned climber, who, in 1958, lead the first team up that route. It took 45 days.

What happens to your brain when you are in this kind of heightened situation?

“When there’s a death consequence, when you are doing things that if you mess up you die, I like the way it causes my senses to peak,” Potter said. “I can see more clearly. You can think much faster. You hear at a different level. Your foot contact on the line is accentuated. Your sense of balance is heightened.”

“Part of me says it’s kind of crazy to think you can fly your human body,” Potter said. “Another part of me thinks all of us have had the dream that we can fly. Why not chase after it? Maybe it brings you to some other tangent. Chasing after the unattainable is the fun part.”

Of course this requires enormous physical skill. But the ability to have that degree of focus is another remarkable example of how the brain works.

Want to read more? This is a story of his El Capitan and Half Dome climb in Outside Magazine.