section_path: Parapsychology/Weight of the soul
section_name: Weight of the soul
paragraph_text: Weight of the soul
  
  In 1901, Duncan MacDougall conducted an experiment (" 21 grams experiment ") in which he made weight-measurements of patients as they died. He claimed that there was weight-loss of varying amounts at the time of death; he concluded the soul weighed 21 grams based on measurements of a single patient, discarding conflicting results. The physicist Robert L. Park wrote that MacDougall's experiments "are not regarded today as having any scientific merit", and the psychologist Bruce Hood wrote that "because the weight loss was not reliable or replicable, his findings were unscientific."