In 1907, a Massachusetts doctor named Duncan MacDougall conducted an unusual series of experiments. Intrigued by the idea that the human soul had mass, and therefore could be heavy, Dr. MacDougall assembled a bed equipped with a sensitive set of beam scales, and convinced to a series of patients with terminal illnesses who are in it during the final moments of their lives.
MacDougall, ready concentrated on the details: he recorded not only the exact time of death of each patient, but also his total time in bed, as well as any change in weight that occurred throughout The moment of expiration. He even factored the losses of body fluids such as sweat and urine, and gases such as oxygen and nitrogen, in his calculations. His conclusion was that the human soul weighed three quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams.
It is hard to imagine that these experiments got some serious attention from the scientific community today. However, the lines of thought that led to them and the reactions they generated remain with us to this day.
Controversy with the investigations of MacDougall and the Soul
The results of the MacDougall study appeared in The New York Times in 1907 . The March article triggered a whole debate between MacDougall and the doctor Augusto P. Clarke.
Clarke noted that at the time of death, the lungs allow the blood to cool, causing the body temperature to rise slightly, which causes the sweat of the skin, which represents the lack of 21 grams of Dr. MacDougall.
For its part, MacDougall argued that the circulation ceases at the time of death, so that the skin is not heated by the increase in temperature. The debate ran all the way to the end of 1907, gathering supporters from both sides along the way.
Four years later, everything was quiet on the MacDougall front, but in 1911 the cover of the New York Times was adorned with an announcement that had upped the ante. This time, he would not be weighing the human soul, but would be photographing at the time the soul left the body.
Although he expressed concern that "the substance of the soul could become (also) agitated" to be photographed at the time of death, he managed to carry out a dozen experiments in which he photographed "a light similar to that of the interstellar ether ” in or around the skulls of the patients at the time they died.
MacDougall died in interstellar ether in 1920, leaving behind a small group of fiery supporters, along with a much larger group of doctors who looked incredulous that this farce had lasted so long. Members of the public settled on one side or the other, and the discussion fell off the radar.
Except it never really was done, at least not completely.
A legacy of Singularity
References to MacDougall's experiments continue to emerge in pop culture every few years, from Victorian times to the present day. The idea that the soul weighs 21 grams has appeared in novels, songs and movies, it has even been the title of a movie. Dan Brown described MacDougall's experiments in some detail in his adventure story The Lost Symbol.
To talk about the experiments of weighing the soul to a person who is in parapsychology, is likely to hear a murmur of approval. Even among the most skeptical people, it is an issue that comes from time to time in the nightly discussions: There once was a boy who tried to weigh the soul ?
The actual results of the experiments, and their failure to achieve acceptance as a scientific canon, are totally out of place. Science has gone one way, and otherwise pop culture. Functional neuroimaging has bound all imaginable functions associated with the soul in regions and structures of the brain. Physics, for its part, has assigned the links between subatomic particles so thoroughly that there is simply no room for spiritual forces.
And still
The idea of weighing the soul remains with us. It is romantic, it is easy to identify, it speaks of some of our deepest longings and fears that gripped MacDougall readers in 1907 and still captivate us today.
A different kind of thinning
To understand why MacDougall wanted to weigh his soul, and why he thought he could, which helps to understand the environment in which he operates. His work is plagued by recognizable terms and ideas of the first theorists of Freud and Jung's psychology. There are a lot of comments psychic functions and principles inspiring grip for precise scientific language to describe consciousness and life itself, in a world that is still ignorant of functional magnetic resonance imaging and DNA.
We are still deeply ignorant, as any honest scientist will tell you . Certain behaviors of quantum particles still baffle the brightest minds; and we are still far from understanding exactly how our brains do most of what they do. We keep looking for the dark matter that constitutes more than 80 percent of the mass of the universe, but we haven't really seen a single atom of it or know where exactly it is.
And in all these dark corners, we still find people who seek the soul. Some claim that over time it is discovered that among the quantum particles. Others insist that it has something to do with the electromagnetic waves that our brains generate. Most scientists reject these claims. However, these researchers and theorists are willing to give up the hope that one day we will be able to ponder, measure and quantify the beyond.
MacDougall's work resonated and continues to resonate, not because of what he found (or could not find), but because of what he suggested. The simple idea behind the experiments was attractive, and for many who follow the debate in The New York Times, the idea was enough to make MacDougall's work worthy of discussion.
How are photons, particles and waves and yet nobody has seen them? How can there be so many planets in our galaxy, however, so few have the answer, and we believe it is as we know it? The universe is full of real unsolved mysteries, whose real answers are out there somewhere.
We do not need the souls of the dead to elaborate a disturbing series of experiments. The very objective, scientific and quantifiable, measurable universe is more than enough to worry us.
AUTHOR: JoT333, editor of the hermandadblanca.org family
