The Pharmacy(tm)

If you’ve seen this pretty depressing movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, you might be interested to know that the significance of its title (apart from the fictional story), has to do with an old scientific experiment that took place in 1907.

Duncan MacDougall was a doctor in Haverhill, Massachusetts who had an interesting query about the human soul. At that time, and up to the present, the very existence of the soul was a largely debated idea, but MacDougall sought to avoid the philosophical and metaphysical debate and instead chose to stick to empirical phenomena and observation.

Actually the accounts of the actual experiment are pretty sketchy depending on the source, but what is generally agreed was that MacDougall attempted to quantify the weight of a human soul by observing dying patients. He was said to have taken observations of the weights of six dying patients as they were in their death throes. The more elaborate accounts say that he placed the patients on special beds equipped with sensitive springs and scales, and took observations of the patients’ weights as they finally died.

It’s a morbid idea, not to mention probably unethical medical practice, but from this macabre set-up, Duncan MacDougall was said to have come up with the average drop in weight of the patients after death, which is, as you may already be expecting: 21 Grams.

These observations have stirred many a debate in the scientific community on various angles, for example: can we equate weight loss to the departure of the soul, etc. Other scientists have criticized the procedure as being taken on too small a sample to have any statistical signficance. Although the thought of scientists weighing hundreds if not thousands of dying people to achieve significance is a chilling one, MacDougall himself was not known to have attempted to replicate or validate the data.

However, since the publication of MacDougall’s findings, the term 21 Grams has attained an urban legend status of its own. More than tackling the fault in the method, MacDougall’s experiment actually says more about fault in reasoning or perception: since the body lost weight, and no observable phenomena (e.g. bowel movement, expectoration, vomiting) seems to have contributed to the weight loss, therefore the loss could only be due to the departure of the soul.

It’s an easily ascribed (although illogical) link, although it can be a complex one, since it deals with people’s biases. For one thing, to fully appreciate MacDougall’s work in the way he intended, one should probably be already predisposed to the notion of a soul’s existence. Otherwise, the experiment can’t really hit two birds with one stone, namely the existence of a soul, and its weight.

Biases in perception can be of a shallower sort: like first impressions, usually of the visual sort. I’ve alluded to optical illusions in a previous post to illustrate not only the eye’s tendency to be fooled, but to also lead to a question of our intentions. Our notion of people is probably 80% influenced by how we appreciate their appearance before anything else.

For example, what are your initial impressions of this guy.

Nice guy? Good with the chicks? You think he’d be a good campfire mate during an outing? Or does he have issues?

Click this link for the answer.

To further test your visual perception bias, I found an online quiz you can take to differentiate the bad guys from the good guys.

Meanwhile, you can read more about MacDougall’s experiment and other people’s thoughts on it in the following sites:

• Lost Magazine
• Rationally Speaking