In the same way death and taxes are inescapable, so are these two questions: Is there such thing as a human soul? And, if so, what happens to it when the physical body dies? Regardless of where you fall on the afterlife spectrum, everyone asks these questions at some point in their life.
Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment: Trying to Prove the Soul
Massachusetts physician Duncan MacDougall sought to answer that first question in the early 1900s in one of the most famous metaphysical experiments to date. Using a total of six bodies of people who died of tuberculosis, he sought to, in essence, weigh the soul. After completing to small yet measurable experiment, MacDougall concluded that the human soul weighed around ¾ of an ounce (or 21 grams).[1]
At first, MacDougall’s findings sound incredible – especially for the time he was conducting these experiments! Not only does it suggest there’s a soul but that it’s somewhat tangible, too. However, skeptics have pointed out flaws, for example:[2]
- MacDougall’s published findings failed to mention the bodies that exhibited no weight loss
- Any weight loss he recorded could be attributed to mere physiological factors (e.g., evaporation)
Has Anyone Else Studied Where the Soul Goes When You Die?
From philosophers to neuroscientists and everyone in between, countless theories have been formulated. Some “confirm” the soul’s existence while others “deny” it.
For anesthesiologist and professor at University of Arizona, Dr. Stuart Hameroff and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, they’ve proposed a theory of consciousness called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (aka Orch-OR). Very simply, their Orch-OR theory suggests that inside your neurons, you have brain neuron microtubules that can potentially – among other things – hold memories (i.e., quantum information) at a subatomic level.[4,5]