A few weeks ago, I was seated with a group of death-curious folks doing what death-curious folks do: talking about death and dying. Someone brought up a scientific study that has "proved" that the human spirit, soul, or our consciousness has a measured weight of 0.75 oz or about 21 grams.
WAIT, WHAT?
Why hadn’t I heard about this story? I mean if this was true, that a physician had actually measured the weight of the human soul, this would be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs, right up there with vaccines, gravity, and DNA!
So, being the natural-born healthy skeptic who’s open to many explanations, I decided to go deep and do a little investigation on this unusual study and its true results. Turns out there are lots of articles and discussions about this controversial theory.
You can’t have a study without some kind of a question. Back in the very early years of the twentieth century, in a small town outside of Boston MA, there practiced a physician, Duncan MacDougall, who hypothesized that if humans had souls, those souls must take up space. And if souls take up space, well, they must weigh something. So he devised an experiment to test this hypothesis.
But before we go there, let’s just consider what was happening in the world of science back then. Science was very different than it is today. What was considered “good” science wouldn’t fly today. Today, the science community has strict, practical, and ethical guidelines that just wasn’t considered back then. Subject samples have to be well informed and provide consent to participate in a study. Sample sizes must be statistically large enough to reflect a population. Treatment of subjects must be considered humane whether animal or human. Data must be recorded with honesty and integrity. The results must reflect the true findings regardless of if it supports the hypothesis or not, and the study must be reproducible for others to conduct.
Another thing we should consider for this discussion is what was going on during this time period, which is really interesting. This time period was the end of what was known as the Victorian Era (1820-1914). What’s critical to know about this time period is that there was great interest in Spiritualism which included seances, medium and psychic work, table tipping, and channeling. So it is not surprising that science would step into the ring in an area of such interest. I mean, imagine if you could scientifically prove that humans have a definitive soul that could be measured!
In MacDougall’s own words published in the medical journal, American Medicine, “The essential thing is that there must be a substance as the basis of continuing personal identity and consciousness, for without space-occupying substance, personality or a continuing conscious ego after bodily death is unthinkable.” So we can see where he may be leaning.
Let’s take a look at the experiment itself.
MacDougall teamed up with Dorchester's Consumptives' Home, a charitable hospital for people with late-stage tuberculosis, which at that time was incurable. MacDougall built a large scale, capable of holding a cot with a dying tuberculosis patient. Tuberculosis was a convenient disease for this experiment, as MacDougall explained in his paper, because patients died in "great exhaustion" and without any movement that would jiggle his scale.
His sample size started with just 6 individuals.
The first patient to successfully die on the MacDougall scale appeared to loose .75 oz or 21.2 grams at the time of death. It should be noted that he did take into account other known bodily changes after death such as urine and fecal loss.
The second patient MacDougall recorded had a loss of 0.5 ounces (14 grams) 15 minutes after he stopped breathing.
His third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 0.5 ounces and then 1 ounce (28.3 g) a minute later.
There didn’t seem to be any consistent data, yet it appeared that he had taken the results from the first death and disregarded the results from the other deaths.
MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale wasn't well calibrated. Case 5 lost 0.375 ounces (10.6 grams), but the scale malfunctioned afterward, raising questions about those numbers, too.
Case 6 was thrown out because the patient died while MacDougall was still adjusting his scale.
So in the end, 3/6 seemed to have provided him with at least decent data.
He next went on to continue his study, but this time on 15 dogs. These dogs were not sick, but instead were euthanized. At the time of death for all 15 dogs, there was no weight loss, which could only mean that, according to MacDougall, dogs don’t have a soul.
In conclusion, MacDougall wrote, “The net result of the experiments conducted on human beings, is that a loss of substance occurs at death not accounted for by known channels of loss. Is it the soul substance? It would seem to me to be so. According to our hypothesis such a substance is necessary to the assumption of continuing or persisting personality after bodily death, and here we have experimental demonstration that a substance capable of being weighed does leave the human body at death."
So was this experiment replicated? Not on humans, however a rancher in Oregon did attempt to replicate the soul-weighing experiment with a dozen sheep in early 2000. Most gained between 1 and 7 ounces (30 to 200 grams), though the gains lasted just a few seconds before the sheep returned to their original weights.
So what is the consensus in the scientific community? Well, the soul may more than likely be measured as energy rather than its weight, using very sensitive electromagnetic instruments, but so far this hasn’t been explored yet.
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