There are some questions science can’t answer. What’s the color of love? How much does a soul weigh? Which drugs should you take before watching the movie version of Cats?
About the ‘soul weight’ thing.
Today’s Moment of Science… the twenty-one gram experiment.
We’ve long struggled with what makes us uniquely, well, us. Is it some combination of our bodies, our minds, our literal and metaphorical smell? Mostly it’s our brains, but don’t discount the smell.
When mummifying bodies, ancient Egyptians would toss the brain, assuming it was useless. To be fair, sometimes they’re still right. It took until 210CE for Roman physician Galen to suggest that maybe these chunks of wrinkly gray jello are responsible for keeping you up until 4am thinking “am I an utter fucking failure for all the things I could have done better and not quite stacking up under this pile of expectations and I feel like I’m standing trapped in the middle of an anxiety storm, but it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.”
Sorry, where was I?
We’ve made a touch of progress from there. Neurons, genetics, and neurotransmitters, oh my! But is that you? What, if anything, is at someone’s core, beyond electrical impulses and chemicals?
I don’t know if a soul is a thing or not. I can’t prove it one way or another. But one guy was like “hang on, I got a gadget to do this.”
Duncan MacDougall was a physician from Haverhill, MA born in 1866. That’s pretty much all history knows about him. The other thing we know? He was very determined to find out what a soul weighed, and in 1901 he went to great lengths of scientific fuckery to accomplish this.
He needed research subjects who were very nearly dead to do this… ethically. He found six patients at a nursing home with the grim reaper perched on their beds whispering “tick tock motherfucker.” He constructed a fancy ass bed on a scale to weigh them as they were dying, trying to control for any expected loss of bodily fluids or vapors from the mouth or other orifices.
He knew he needed a control for this experiment. Because if people lost weight at the moment of death, to the forward thinking man of science of 1901 this meant the soul had weight. But what if every species, like ones that obviously didn’t have souls, also lost weight upon death? He needed a control species.
He chose dogs, which suggests he’s a monster who never had himself a goodest of doggos.
Amazingly, the results he published in 1907 showed a weight loss of twenty-one grams suddenly at the time of death. The dogs he tested did not lose weight when they died. So, dogs are soulless crotch sniffers designed to retrieve sticks and eat cat poop, humans have souls that weigh ¾ of an ounce. It’s science.
Hooboy, where to start?
Of the six humans, only one lost the “weight of a human soul.” Two allegedly experienced equipment malfunctions, giving him no usable data. One lost weight and gained it back. The other two had an immediate weight loss and continued losing weight quickly thereafter, which seems like a weird way for a soul to go.
Dr. MacDougall had claimed that “the soul’s weight is removed from the body virtually at the instant of last breath, though in persons of sluggish temperament it may remain in the body for a full minute.” Which was a funny way of saying “I’m gonna need you to get all the way off my back for these shitty results.” The line between life and death is a blurred thing. Even if he chose the time of death consistently based on breathing patterns, without knowing more about their vital signs, it’s difficult to verify if these measurements were even taken at the moment of death.
As for the dogs, there doesn’t seem to be evidence that he used terminally ill dogs. Take that for what you will.
From this one patient who lost 21 grams in a trial with only four usable data points, the rumor persists in some circles that we lose weight when we die, signifying that our souls are leaving our bodies. The data has never been replicated, and is not considered credible. MacDougall went on to try to photograph the soul, a pursuit which failed him.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, suggesting that if science proves we have something called a soul, don’t believe any experiment that says dogs don’t have them too.
To get tales of scientific fuckery delivered right to your inbox daily and other exclusive bonuses, head to patreon.com/scibabe.
Join the discussion!