ahhh, a favorite topic of mine. Brains.
A member of the 1953 Everest team, Wilfrid Noyce, declared that, “The top layers of my brain were probably dormant up there.” (1954, p. 237). To make matters much worse, Noyce would candidly admit, “At the time I thought I was as alert as at sea level.” (1954, p. 182). Such neurological cost of climbing to extreme altitude would later be studied by anesthesiologist Tom Hornbein et al, (1989). On the West Ridge traverse of Everest in 1963, he himself had fatalistically depicted the outrageously dangerous, exposed, and hypoxic situation this way: “Death had no meaning, nor, for that matter, did life.” (1965, p. 175)
