Let’s travel until 1907, the year science wanted to prove that the soul exists – and failed, roundly.
If it has weight, it has mass; If it has mass, there is. “And our soul? If you have weight, it’s real!” It was after reaching this conclusion that the doctor Duncan MacDougall It began to weigh the human soul in 1907.
At the height of the fashion of spiritualism, the doctor – which, curiously, was as “practical and scientific mind” in that same year his study Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance no Journal of the American Society for Psychical Researchfrom the idea that if consciousness or personality survive death, they necessarily have to occupy physical space and therefore have mass. When dying, this mass would theoretically disappear from the body.
The American began a real experience. He weighed six terminals patients on a scale specially designed to measure tin weight variations at the time of death. The first patient observed was a man, described by “an ordinary citizen, with the usual American temperament.” The moment it died, the balance recorded a sudden loss of mass: 21.2 gramsto be exact.
Macdougall guaranteed that this value corresponded to the weight of the human soul which, at the time of death, abandoned the body. The “21 grams experience” would fascinate the world, having to date inspiration for several books (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife2005, from Mary Roach), movies (21 grams2003), series (Evil2022) and even sleeves and anime, such as One Piece, which addresses the topic.
But returning to the centenary experience. Despite what the balance said, Macdougall was aware of some factors that could interfere with the results, such as the expiration of the last air, the loss of body fluids or the evaporation of sweat. Left for calculations. The evaporation rate of sweat per minute had no significant impact; EXPIERATION NOT Nor. And despite the very weak sample of six patients with tuberculosis of that Dorchester hospital – and even the fact that one of them died while adjusting the scale and the lost weights were not exactly the same as 21 grams – Macdougall believed that these factors confirm that the departure of the soul happens in death.
Confronted by the scientific community, which massacred him after the bombastic title of the teams (“doctor believes the soul has weight”) the American is “very aware that these few experiences do not prove the issue, just like some swallows do not do the summer.” When dogs weighed, it did not detect weight loss, but not all dogs go to the sky, he justified.
The doctor did not give up. In fact, in 1911, four years after the study, tried to photograph the soulwith X-rays, inspired by WJ Kilner’s experiences, known for his studies on human auras, hoping that the soul would emerge as a light.
Macdougall could never capture the soul, and died in 1920, at 54 years. Others tried to complete their search for the mysterious weight of the human spirit, but failed. At one point, Twining weighed rats on the brink of death and concluded that weight loss was due to moisture… or gases.
To this day, no one knows what happens when we die, not if something in us survives death – much less how much it weighs. So why until today we continue to feed this experience whose conclusion has been discredited?
The answer, in a word: hope. Hope that something of us remains after death. If we want to explain the phenomenon in other words: the fascination with the unknown. If we want to be more critical, we cannot fail to blame the arrogance to us inherent and that imposes on us a need to be greater than death; blaming our sense of superiority, which tells us in the mirror that we are too special to have an end, like all other species. This human feeling, yes, seems to live forever.
Tomás Guimarães, Zap //
