How much does the soul weigh?

no chakras that line up with the chin uh? Like, why is that like an energy point where the growth of a little facial hair would somehow protect the soul patch the soul, keep the soul in the body. What does it mean when you shave it off to you? Are you soul? This we're already getting into that that that that that ever present issue of of the soul, the human soul. And we've we've talked about this before in the past. This idea of of some immortal slice

of ourselves dates back to ancient times. Ancient religions used of use of an astral body, This idea that you have your physical body, but then there's also some there's an immage, immaterial immortal you as well, and then you can take that all the way up into the twentieth century um where most of philosophers are are toying with this idea of persons has souls and human beings are made up of two substances, soul and body, soma and sark. Yeah, I wanted to point out that the ancient Hebrew word

for soul is nepeesche, meaning life or vital breath. The Greek word for soul is psyche or mind, which I think gives another flavor of this idea of soul, And the Roman Latin word for soul is animal or spirit or breath. So in all of these variations on the word soul, you see how it is multilayered, and again this sort of ephemeral quality to it that's sort of like fog that you can't trap into a suitcase. Feeling right, yeah, and a lot And we're not gonna get too deep

into this, but I mean, obviously he has is. We're we're dealing with our ephemeral lives and the ephemeral lives of everyone else around us, Like it's it's it's very tempting to to fall into that line of thinking and to or even you know, to to embrace that line of thinking where when you look at the dead body of a loved one and there's something like the spark has gone, the life has gone out of them. To think about that spark being somewhere else. Yeah, I was

thinking about that with the law of contagion. We've talked about that before. It's it's magical thinking that things that have once been in contact with each other will continue to act on each other at a distance even when physical contact has been severed. And in this sense, the soul is part of that contagient, this idea that the

persistence of the individual soul u continues after life ends. Yeah, so again you come down to you have the physical world, and you have this world of the spirit, this world of the unseen. Right. Uh. And I'm not and I'm I'm not like a hardcore skeptic who's going to say, all right that you know only the scientific side of things, don't you know, don't even entertain the idea of the unseen. I mean, I think the unseen has it has a place in my life. I recognize it has an important

place in other people's lives. The inevitable conflict, though, is when you have scientific understanding of the world butting heads with ideas about the unseen and and and magical thinking and uh and at times elaborate metaphysical ideas about what is happening to some immortal part of ourselves. The problem here is that you cannot prove the soul. You cannot

disprove it. And yet it's one of the maybe the largest looming questions that we have as humans because it involves the sort of beginning and ends of things that we've talked about before. You've even tied this back to the Big Bang. We know the Big Bang began, that's when time be in. What was before it, you know what is after it. So it all sort of circles back into this idea of it's culmination of atoms that's

organized in our individual bodies. What is there some sort of fate for that that we don't understand or we don't know or they're not Yeah, I think skeptic Michael schermer Uh puts it perfectly over on skeptics dot com excellent website. Um He says, I define the soul as the unique pattern of information that represents the essence of a person. By this definition, unless there is some medium to retain the pattern of our personal information. After we die,

our soul dies with us. Our bodies are made of proteins coated by our DNA, so that the disintegration of d n A, our protein patterns are lost forever. Our memories and personality are stored in the pattern of neurons firing in our brain, So when those neurons die, it spells the death of our memories and personality, similar to the ravages of stroke and Alzheimer's disease, only final. And this underlying the fact that it's really difficult to try and use science to create a working model of of

of what a soul would even be. Yeah, the soul problem is very similar to the immortality problem and the consciousness problem. And I would even say that, um that in some ways consciousness is we've talked about it, and we do talk about it is kind of a stand in for the soul, and that maybe in these more modern times we talked less about the soul and more about consciousness because we have this idea of consciousness about being, this awareness and it existing inside of time, and the

big question is can it exist outside of time? And if you say consciousness arises from the electrochemical process of the brain and nothing more than you could take the hard line and say that when the lights go out in the brain, so too does consciousness, so too does this sense of soul. Yeah. Indeed, hearkens back to our episode on reincarnation where you had scientific xplory of reincarnation and they referred to it as UH survival of of

of consciousness. Now that doesn't mean that that some intrepid UH explorers out there in the world couldn't try to quantify the soul UH qualified even And there is one person in particular named Duncan McDougall who was a respected turn of the century surgeon in Massachusetts, and he was occupied with a very particular question which maybe even started out as a thought experiment, but then became an actual

experiment that he tried to do. And according to Mary Roach in her book Spook, McDougald wrote, quote, it is unthinkable that personality and consciousness can be attributes of that which does not occupy space. And if they occupy space, he reasoned, they must have weight. He says, quote the equal the question arose in my mind, why not weigh

a man at the very moment of death? This he thought, would give you the exact weight of the soul, and not just the weight of the soul of like, hey, I wonder how much this wul ways, but more like the soul exists. Yeah, he's going into it with the preconceived notion there's a soul. Uh. The open question is

how much does it weigh? Now. This led to McDougall hanging around a consumptive's home around nineteen o one, chatting up the gravely ill tuberculoisis patients and, according to McDougal's writings in the Journal of the American Society for Physical Research, obtaining consent from a few of them to weigh their bodies at the moment of their death and side note, uh, he chose this particular illness advanced stages stage of tuberculosis because quote, a consumpt of dying after a long illness,

wasting his energies, dies with scarcely a movement to disturb the beam means that the beam that is on the scale their bodies are all a very light and we can be for a warned for hours that a consumptive is dying, because you need that window in which to act, and he's not a complete crazy person. So he's not

gonna go around killing people. No, no, I actually thought this was a very a logical way to hone in on the person who's dying, that you would the ideal dying person, right, is going to be quiet about it and easily transported. Indeed, so he transports him in. He puts him on the bed on the scale, and uh. In on April tenth, nine oh one, Uh, he you could say, treats his first patient. Assisted by two physicians, they watch a man die upon a cot placed upon

a customized industrial scale scale for weighing silk. Yes, and for three and a half hours, they watch his every single movement, his chest going up and down, to try to determine the exact moment that he dies so that they can hopefully record a lowering of his weight, which would uh give them some sort of clue that the soul had escaped the body. And low and behold he dies in the scale lowers to three quarters of an ounce or about indeed. Uh. And so that's where you've

ever heard the twenty one Grahams. It was the name of a film several years ago. And and and in naming the film that they probably helped substantiate this, uh, this idea that the solways twenty one ground. Yeah. And in fact, right before he published his results in American Medicine,

he had a paper that he was um publishing. The New York Times got wind of this, and they pretty much just reported it as fact, like, hey, by the way, the soul when it departs twenty one grams, and that kind of cemented this idea in popular culture that this was indeed a thing. Yeah. I mean despite the fact, as we'll get into that, it's not like everyone was like, oh, that sounds great, I buy that. No, there was plenty of scientific minds out there criticized this after it came out,

but um, McDougal repeated this experiment five times. Um. His his findings appeared in American Medicine nineteen seven, and uh, that's when the well deserved criticisms began to roll in regarding these experiments. In their findings, findings that were there were crude, varying, and unreplicated in subsequent experiments. And naturally, that's a major red flag about any experiment out there. If if, if no one else can follow your steps

and come to the same result. Now, Mary Roach in her books Books says there are two ways of looking at mcdougald's findings. One is that he was pretty much like a nutter. That's that's actually the word she uses for him, um. And the other is that his experiment protocols were weak sauce, essentially lacking rigor and uniformity. And we'll talk more about that. So the not a question

is interesting, why why might he have been a nutter? Well, he wrote his thesis on the law of similars, this idea that like cures like and this is a homeopathic approach to medicine. Now, back in his day, homeopathy was not something that was fringe. UM. McDougald was just kind of following the lead at the time. So it may not be that he was so much a nutter, but maybe just trying to rack up some accolades and some

status where he could. Now I was pointed out by mcdougald's contemporary critics, um and and this may have come to the mind of people listening as well. Um. There are other things that leave the body over the course of death, um, such as a theces and urine and uh. And so this was one instant critic criticism where people say, well, the body died urine, THECES came out, maybe that had something to do with the loss. McDougal was quick to insist that the bed on the scales would have caught

all of this, so it wouldn't be an issue. But still,

there's something called insensible loss. This is body weight that is continually lost through evaporating perspiration, through water vapor in your breath, and just throughout a normal day, and daily loss really can't be measured, but we're probably talking like between forty and six hundred UM mill of leaders in an adult under normal circumstances, and certainly death is not a normal circumstance, right, So you have that criticism going on about what the loss actually consists of, and then

you have the criticism again of the scientific rigors or the lack of them. So let's consider that first, six dying patients is not a large enough sample size. Just the outset like this is not, you know, something that draw a bunch of conclusions upon. Second, the time of death is a really tricky thing. Even now, it's a tricky thing. So when you look at McDougal's work, you have to wonder what he did he mean by the time of death, are we talking about cellular death, brain death,

physical death, heart death, legal death? And the fact that at that time they didn't really have all of the technology available to even try to determine any of those. Third, his data in his sample size was all over the place. Two of the results had to be excluded because of technical difficulties. For instance, when it came to patient number four, McDougald wrote, quote, our scales were not finally adjusted, and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed

to our work. And he doesn't say, like, what what do you mean? What people? What kind of interference? I mean, I can't help the picture people with pitchforks, like out of franky, Yeah yeah right. Um. And then one patients death did show a drop in weight of about three eighths of an ounce, but this later reversed itself. Two of the other patients registered and immediate loss of weight at the moment of death, but then their weight dropped again in a few minutes later, so that that led

uh some people that say, well did that person tied twice? Um, And only one of the six patients showed a sudden and non reversible loss of weight of three four s of an ounce of course our twenty one Graham, So that's one and as you had said in follow up studies, this could not be replicated. Now fil this under the the realization that McDougal again is probably not a complete crazy person like he He knew that he lacked concrete findings.

He didn't say case closed, just the soul. He wanted to do more, including placing an electric chair on the scale so as to measure the sole loss of an executed prisoner, but there was already objection from from local officials. So definitely there was opposition to the prospect of executing people in his lab. So he didn't get to experiment on people anymore after these initial experiments. Now he did

turn to dogs. He experimented on fifteen which he killed himself. Uh, and he saw no weight change, but he had an explanation for that, maybe dogs just don't have souls, which kind of underlines again the problem of taking the seen world of science and using it to investigate the unseen, that where so much of it is just based on on these these different metaphysical ideas of and these different constructs of how it's supposed to work. Um, does a dog have a soul? You know? Yeah, I mean you

have to say it's his? Is his? Uh? This is not for a lack of trying. I mean he once he cannot have access to humans, he's going to dogs. He's also inviting other people to try to replicate his results, to try to do these experiments. But of course, and

the medical community isn't exactly embracing this. Luckily, ten years later, Los Angeles Polytechnic High School physics teacher h. Laft Whining self published a book called The Physical Theory of the Soul, in which he decided to jump into this and you know,

following the footsteps, the scientific footsteps of McDougal. Um, he didn't work on any people, but he did kill thirty mice, which he was convinced must surely have souls, which is again it's an interesting, colorful a deviation from from McDougall himself said the dogs probably don't have souls, is why

he didn't register. But he's going into this saying, yes, mice have souls and therefore their perfect thing to experiment on in his soul weighing experiments using a varying UH and at times creative methods of execution resulted mostly with no loss. No possible weight loss that you could attribute to a soul, the only one save in the case of cyanide poison mice UH which he conducted may have

lost weight via frantic death throw perspiration. So he drowned some mice after that in a sealed container and recorded no weight change. So this is probably our best exam ample of someone following up his work abbit with mice and in recording his results. Yeah, that is actually pretty rigorous testing and experimenting in comparison to the next person who takes on McDougal's legacy, and his name is Gilbert Carpenter,

and in he publishes the online book Physically Wing the Soul. Now, he does not conduct any experiments himself, but he does a lot of tinkering with numbers, and he thinks about this deeply. And his idea was that the souls of the dogs and mice were so light that they just wouldn't register on the scale. That's why this this is failing.

And according to Mary Roach and Spook quote using McDougal's findings, that the soul weighs about twenty Graham's Carpenter calculated the ratio of soul weight to body weight at birth one to forty. He then applied this to typical puppy birth weight and from there deduced the average dog soul weighs one gram, which it turns out is less than the sensitivity of the scale McDougal used to weigh the dead dogs.

And I that's the rub right, because mcdougull's scale was, according to McDougald, accurate to one sixteenth of an ounce or one point eight grams. Therefore, dog soul to light. Now that seems like a convenient loophole. I wanted to mention that other features of a Carpenter's book is that he calculates the volume of the human soul, and this volume he uses them as a metric, dubbing it the

MAC after McDougal. He puts forth the idea that one way to weigh the soul would be to weigh a pregnant woman at the moment that the MAC entered the fetus around forty three days, when the brain waves are first detected. He says, um, and if you have a pint. He even goes into this, This is a great Mary Rage goes into this in in her books book Um that he suggests that the best way to get rid of a ghost is to invite a pregnant woman over around that three day period and then use her as

a portal to store the ghost away. Well that that makes the next perfect sense. It gets worse from there. There's there's talk about lepri cons too, Yeah, something about the like the human soul would take up the space of a lepricn because you want to start throwing lepricn into your study just to make yourself, no, make it seem like you know what you're talking about. Yeah, and then there's some calculations about Jesus soul, which is I

don't know, five hundred two hons. Uh. What I like about it is that he did do some reverse engineering with mathematics to try to get at the heart of this. But unfortunately, this is where McDougal's legacy leaves off. Yes, indeed it does. UM. But you know, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna look at some some more modern uh cosmic uh and physics based ideas about what what this where this soul might be in and indeed how you might try and

measure it in some way. All Right, we're back, and I bet you, just bet you that quantics is going to get wrapped up in all this whole wing. Oh yeah. I mean, quantum physics is kind of a it's a handy place at times to sort of store these unknowns, right, because it's kind of it's kind of a wild frontier in many respects um. In Mary Roach's book Spook, she does talk to an individual by the name of Gary

naum Um. He's a Duke University Medical School professor, uh, and he has done a fair amount of thinking in this now he's he's he's done a bit of writing on oh on on predicting the future via science, uh, into to what extent we can do it. And he's also done a lot of of of thinking and writing on consciousness. So he proposed, is that one interesting way to potentially measure or at least hunt for the weight of the soul, if you will, is to use hermetically

sealed box a top hyper sensitive scales. Alright, so far that that pretty much lines up with some earlier notions we're discussing, But then he ads this you also surround uh, the box and the scales with various radiant energy detectors. Why well, because information, right, Because in Schermer's words that we mentioned earlier, we're talking about this unique pattern of information that represents the essence of a person, and that

information is energy. There's always a weight loss with energy loss, and if the energy changes, then the mass must change in some minute, barely discernible way. So uh Nam's idea here is that if more mass dissipates they can be accounted for due to energy change, then perhaps perhaps that extra energy would be consciousness leaving the body. And since energy can neither be created or destroyed, it has to

go somewhere, right, Um, now, that's somewhere. Uh is kind of trippy because uh In according to some of the names uh uh theories and in idea and ideas here he postulates that, based on the increase of black hole entropy in the region of event horizons, that similarly the negative entropy or post death ordered transformed consciousness may go through a type of extra dimensional parallel universe hyperspace in the regions of the plank length, where the energy of

the departed consciousness goes into small types of singularities embedded within our own four dimensional spacetime world. In two thousand five, attempted to raise some money for experimentation, but nothing came to fruition. But again he's he's written about this, and it's at the very least it's some some very interesting thought experimentation in terms of again taking on that difficult task of trying to make create a working model how a soul and survival of the soul might work in

our scientific world. But how do you suss out the electrochemical um changes in the brain that are part of death and part of consciousness and then just part of the rest of your body, Uh, you know, falling apart. Atomically, We're not falling apart, but you know, I'm saying like this is where it gets. At this point, you just you just want to call the ghostbusters proton PACs, you know.

So this makes me think about Richard Kiman, who gave this talk about scientific rigor and about really trying to

make sure that your processes were correct. And he talks about this experiment with rats in nine seven and it says it's a little known experiment, but as guy Paul Thomas Young had this long corridor with um doors on one side that the rats amen, and doors on the other side of those doors there was food, and he wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third down, third door down from

wherever they had started from. And this corridor, all of this was uniformly constructed, right, But the thing is is that the rats would keep going to the door where the food was previously, and this was driving him nuts, and he tried to figure out different things he could do. He painted the doors really carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. But still the rats would go to the previous door where the

food had been. And then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he changed the smell of the food with chemicals, and then the rats could still tell. And eventually he figured out that the rats could discern the previous door by the way the floor sounded when

they ran over it. And so I bring this up because the story about this is that you have to discover all the things about something before you can discover what it is you're specifically going in to try to discover about the rats, right, like you have to discover everything you can about this process before you can actually

get the results you want. And this is a kind of scientific rigor that you know, hopefully everybody is bringing to the table when they're conducting experiments, and it makes it this is something concrete, rats amazed, and now you're talking about something extremely abstract with souls and then trying to apply science to that. And then again this is

where it all falls apart. And Adam Frank, who is a theoretical computational master physicists, he says, quote for myself, I remain fully, infirmly agnostic on the question of a natural life in the soul. If ever there was a place where firm convictions seemed misplaced, this is it. They're simply is no controlled, experimental, verifiable information to support either

you wrought versus you go on positions. You know, I think I've made this analogy before, but when I when it comes to you know, science and religion or faith or metaphysics bumping heads. I've been think of it in terms of someone who has a pet um python and a pet rat, like they are both fine pets to have. It's it's you know, and you can you can gain a lot from that relationship with that that that rat

a lot from that relationship with that that snake. But it would be foolhardy to keep them in the same case, Like it's they cannot live in the same enclosure without the inevitable occurring. And and I often feel like that with with these matters, like I can't have my pet rat and I have my pet snake, but I know

that there are compatibility issues between the two. You know, we remember this keynotes speech we gave and it was in Minneapolis, and we were doing it at a confidence and we were talking about how science is not apart from us. And one of the points we were making is that science is storytelling, and uh, you you break it down to just like here, it is trying to be as pragmatic and objective and empirical as possible about

your reality. And yet on the other side of all of those particulars is a story that comes out of it. And so I think that we are completely compelled. We can't help ourselves to try to put a story, even in scientific terms, to the two things that maybe we don't really have the understanding or the correct language to depict. And that's where trying to well the way a soul comes in and becomes like this problematic, really messy problem that we get into. Alright, today, you have it of

the soul. What happens when science and religion come together and we try to prove the unseen world of using the tools of the scene. If you would like to hear more from us, check out all the podcast episodes that's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, along with blog post videos, links out to our social media accounts, you name it. And if you want to weigh in on the soul matters, well you can do so by sending us an email to blow the mind at how stuff Works dot com.