A hundred feet above me, Christof Koch is hanging by a thread. Three quarters of the way up a rock face, he has lost his grip and is now dangling at the end of a rope above cascading waves of flesh-colored granite in the spectacular “Real Hidden Valley” canyon of the Joshua Tree National Monument. As a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech, Koch heads a team of researchers who are trying to discover the physiological basis of consciousness. At the moment, however, his own consciousness is sorely taxed. “What am I supposed to do?” he calls to his superbly skilled climbing partner, fellow Caltech scientist Kai Zinn, who is waiting at the top.Under Zinn’s guidance, Koch regains his hold on the vertical face and clambers to the top, disappearing over the edge in a puff of climbing chalk and a flash of red booties. For a moment, there is nothing but rocks and sky and a single swallow flitting overhead. Then suddenly the air resounds with a whoop, echoes ricocheting off the canyon walls as if the very geology were rejoicing in his triumph.

Koch is a man infectiously in love with life: In addition to rock climbing, about which he insists he is a novice, his hobbies include swing dancing, at which he is something of an expert. As a university student in Germany, he belonged to a fraternity that practiced Mensur Fechten or ritual fencing, in which opponents stand a foot apart and slice at the air in front of one another’s faces with razor-sharp swords. In his 20s, Koch took up ballet — “I loved the women. I loved the music. And I loved the gracefulness of the movement.” Now, as he watches Zinn defy gravity on an overhanging face, he reflects that climbing is a lot like ballet, at its best an exquisitely choreographed, weightless dance. “Experiencing the absolute,” Koch calls it.

At first glance, rock climbing would seem to require maximal conscious awareness, but as Zinn rappels to the ground Koch tells me that the aim is to let go of your mind and let the body take over. Great climbers, like great dancers, must relinquish control to the unconscious mind. No one could have more respect for the powers of the unconscious than Koch. Most of what we do, he says, is not under our conscious control; we’re not even aware we’re doing it. Take walking: “When you walk, you don’t think lift leg, move leg forward, put leg down. You just walk!” The same is true for talking. When you speak, you don’t suddenly have to think about grammar and syntax and vocabulary, you just open your mouth and the words come out. “If you had to consciously think through that stuff,” says Koch, “you’d never get anywhere.”


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