March 3, 2015 • 28 mins
Is it possible to measure the energy lost when the "soul" departs the body? Take a tour of soul-weighing and the quest to make what is immaterial material ijn this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome is stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and my name is Julie
soul Patch Douglas soul Patch Douglas. Yeah, and weear my
soul patch today. Oh yeah, right there on the chin. Yeah.
I've often wondered about the naming of the soul patch.
(00:25):
Is it is it tied into anything? Like there are
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
(00:47):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
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,
(02:55):
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
(03:18):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:08):
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,
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:18):
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,
(07:41):
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
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:27):
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
(09:47):
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
(10:10):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:57):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:39):
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,
(12:00):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:49):
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
(14:11):
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
(14:31):
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
(14:54):
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
(15:15):
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
(15:35):
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,
(15:56):
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
(16:17):
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
(16:38):
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
(17:00):
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,
(17:23):
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,
(17:45):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:28):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:11):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
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,
(20:42):
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
(21:04):
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.
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:56):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:42):
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
(24:03):
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,
(24:24):
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.
(24:48):
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
(25:11):
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
(25:32):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:13):
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
(26:36):
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
(26:58):
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
(27:18):
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.
(27:42):
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
(28:04):
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.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome is stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and my name is Julie
soul Patch Douglas soul Patch Douglas. Yeah, and weear my
soul patch today. Oh yeah, right there on the chin. Yeah.
I've often wondered about the naming of the soul patch.
(00:25):
Is it is it tied into anything? Like there are
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
(00:47):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:12):
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
(02:33):
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,
(02:55):
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
(03:18):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:04):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:08):
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,
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:18):
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,
(07:41):
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
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
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
(09:06):
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,
(09:27):
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
(09:47):
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
(10:10):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:57):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:39):
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,
(12:00):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:49):
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
(14:11):
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
(14:31):
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
(14:54):
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
(15:15):
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
(15:35):
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,
(15:56):
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
(16:17):
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
(16:38):
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
(17:00):
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,
(17:23):
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,
(17:45):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:28):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:11):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
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,
(20:42):
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
(21:04):
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.
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:56):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:42):
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
(24:03):
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,
(24:24):
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.
(24:48):
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
(25:11):
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
(25:32):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:13):
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
(26:36):
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
(26:58):
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
(27:18):
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.
(27:42):
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
(28:04):
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.
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