Have you ever wondered what happens to the human soul when the physical body dies?
Regardless of your personal thoughts on the afterlife, all of us think of these or similar questions, sooner or later.
Duncan MacDougall was among those people.
In the 1900s, this Massachusetts scientist was eager to discover the weight of the soul. This experiment is remembered as one of the most popular metaphysical experiments of all time.
He believed that if the soul has a mass, it could be weighed. So, he decided to find out the weight of the soul in a really unusual experiment that involved terminally ill people.
The Experiment to Weigh the Human Soul
In 1907, MacDougall did several experiments to weigh the human soul. In one of them, he placed a bed fitted with sensitive beam scales and asked terminally ill patients to lie down on this bed during their final moments.
MacDougall was very meticulous and recorded each of these patients’ total time spent on the bed, their exact time of passing, as well as any changes in weight that happened during their passing.
He also included losses of fluids in his calculations, including the loss of urine and sweat, and gases like nitrogen and oxygen. His final calculations led him to the weight of three-fourths of an ounce or 21 grams.
His findings were considered amazing for the time he was living in. His results suggested that there’s a soul and it’s tangible.
Despite being published, MacDougall’s findings were criticized for failing to mention the bodies without any weight loss and the fact that any weight loss that he wrote down could have been a result of physiological effects like evaporation.
Experiments like this one rarely attract serious attention from the science world; however, the reactions that such experiments caused have been present to this day.
Were There Other Studies of Where the Soul Goes When Humans Die?
There have been numerous theories about the path of the soul after death. From philosophers to neuroscientists, there are many potential answers and theories given.
Plenty of experts deny the existence of the soul whereas others confirm it.
One theory about the human soul proposed by the anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose, a physicist from Britain, is a theory of consciousness called Orch-OR or the Orchestrated Objective Reduction.
According to this theory, inside our neurons, we have brain neuron microtubules that can hold memories at a subatomic level.
When discussing the soul and existence, definitions are essential. To explain Hameroff and Penrose’s theory, we have to assume that the human consciousness and the human soul may be the same thing.
Penrose explains that if someone dies temporarily, the memories inside the microtubules in the brain go into the universe. But, if this person is resuscitated, the information is channeled back inside the microtubules and this is what we know as the near-death experience.
Through the Wormhole is a documentary in which Hameroff explains this concept so that everyone can understand it better:
“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing; the microtubules lose their quantum state. The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be killed, and it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large.
If the patient is resuscitated, or revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules, and the patient says ‘I had a near-death experience.’ If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”
This means that once a person dies, their consciousness/soul may go back to the universe and therefore, one is not dead. This theory of consciousness is definitely exciting to ponder about it.
If you believe we’re more than atoms bouncing off of each other, these theories may offer insight into what happens in the afterlife.
Remember, these theories don’t necessarily mean the truth. As a concept, the soul has not yet been proven or disproven by science. Whichever the case is, it remains a question that we’re all trying to discover the answers to in this journey called life.
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