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CRAIG PARRY

Giving up his smartphone meant Hemsworth had to find his way, old school: He read maps before hiking into the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales. And he memorized routes—stimulating the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center—to avoid getting lost in Australia’s largest highland area.

“That was tense,” Chris Hemsworth acknowledged after working through stress by swimming with wrists and ankles trussed, at the Sydney Aquatic Center. Such fraught situations taught the actor not to panic.

Wearing an MIT-designed suit that replicates aging by limiting movement and dulling the senses, Hemsworth spent three days in a retirement community. Listening to people whose deaths were imminent, he said, was a lesson “in many ways of health and wellness but, most importantly, in how to live a beautiful life.”

While fasting, Hemsworth plays underwater hockey—another extreme activity filmed for the Limitless series.

Hemsworth puts his surfing skills to use in the Norwegian Arctic. “It was physically painful beyond measure from anything I've ever felt,” he said of swimming sans wet suit in the freezing waters. His skin turned red, as his brothers stood on the shore, bundled against the cold.

In his new National Geographic series, Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, the actor completes a test of the body’s reactions to fear: He climbed up a hundred-foot-long rope suspended from a cable car, high above a canyon floor in Australia’s Blue Mountains.