On April 10, 1901, Duncan Macdougall, a physician in Haverhill, Massachusetts, completed an experiment designed to measure the human soul, the first of six he would complete in his lifetime. Using an industrial scale designed for weighing silk, accurate to one-fifth of an ounce, Macdougall weighed a male tuberculosis patient before and immediately after he died. It took three hours and forty minutes for the man to expire, and at the moment of his death he lost three-fourths of an ounce. This, by Macdougall’s calculations, was the weight of the human soul.
According to Mary Roach’s book “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,” Macdougall didn’t publish his findings until 1907, when his research appeared in both the Journal of the American Society for Physical Research and American Medicine. In March of that year, the Times ran a story called “Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks.” Perhaps because he wasn’t able to find additional human subjects, Macdougall performed the rest of his research on dogs, which he determined had no souls because their weights did not change after death.
Last January, John Ortberg, a senior pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, and Bradley Wright, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, released a simpler way of measuring a soul: SoulPulse, a technology project that captures real-time data on the spirituality of Americans. SoulPulse attempts to quantify the soul, an unbodied version of what FitBit, the exercise-tracking device, has done for the body. After filling in a brief intake survey on your age, race, ethnicity, education, income, and religious affiliation, SoulPulse contacts you twice a day with questions about your physical health, spiritual disciplines, and religious experiences. Each of the surveys takes less than five minutes to complete.
Baptized in the Lutheran Church, and a believer, I enrolled in SoulPulse for two weeks. I told it how I’d slept and what I’d been doing, whether I’d had anything to drink or taken any drugs, who I was with, if I’d been praying or worshiping, how close I felt to God. There were drop-down menus, slider buttons, and actual buttons to click, but no narrative answers were accepted. Day to day, I felt like I was adding up my spiritual position. Just how joyful was I? How peaceful? How grateful? Was I more aware of God when I was commuting or when I was using a computer? I had participated in a few research studies before, but I had never felt the observer effect—in which a subject changes her behavior as a result of feeling watched—so strongly. I didn’t doubt the experiment’s guarantee of anonymity, but being asked about my spiritual disciplines made me more eager to practice them.
One busy afternoon, I wondered how long it had been since I’d prayed, and realized that it had not been since that morning. Being asked so often to look for God’s presence made me want to be more aware of it, an experience not unlike gathering for worship on a Sunday morning, when the liturgy of the church makes me aware of things seen and unseen, attentive to the known and unknown. I asked Ortberg and Wright about the observer effect, and about a deeper skepticism I have about quantifying spirituality. I am a strong believer, but I chafe at any kind of program or book series that promises rewards or guarantees sacred fruits. Spirituality, it seems to me, is a thing that can not be counted.
Ortberg, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, listened to my concerns, and said, “On the one hand, not everything can be put in a test tube or seen with a microscope. The most important dimensions of life have to do with the spirit, and those aren’t always quantifiable. But using the best tools and methods available seems like a worthwhile thing.” He also stressed that, while SoulPulse is using new tools, it is answering old questions. Describing Brother Lawrence’s “The Practice of the Presence of God,” a seventeenth-century text that linked God’s presence to daily tasks like doing the dishes and cooking meals, Ortberg said that believers across the centuries have tried to cultivate a mindfulness of the holy. He also pointed to Frank Laubach’s “The Game With Minutes,” a book from 1953 that taught practitioners to turn their minds toward God as often as possible, at least one second of every minute of every day.
“This is trying to use technology to gauge and enhance a tremendously old practice, to be aware of, to look for the divine in everyday experience,” Ortberg said. SoulPulse is simply a technological attempt at creating something like “The Way of a Pilgrim,” a nineteenth-century Russian account of one man’s spiritual development. (It plays a key role in J. D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey.”) Record keeping of this variety is a way to direct ourselves to the holy.
While SoulPulse was designed as a research device, Ortberg hopes that it might eventually be adapted into a tool for spiritual growth, for small groups or individuals seeking direction. “Anybody who is interested in the life of the spirit would say, ‘I don’t want to drain the mystery, or make it mechanical or superficial,’ ” Ortberg said. But, he cautioned, “if you don’t roll up your sleeves and try to track things, there can be such a vagueness that you’re never able to learn or understand.”
I certainly felt that tension during my two weeks. The spirit is a mysterious thing, and it felt awfully hokey to see it displayed in brightly colored pie charts and bar graphs. What did it mean that my awareness of God and my love, joy, and peace levels were lowest on Saturday? Or that I often had a dip in my spirituality after eating? I wasn’t surprised to learn that my spiritual self was least active while watching television, though I do think that my conversations following certain shows were some of the most theologically significant I had in the period of the survey.
At the end of two weeks, the data arrived. Scanning through the information felt inconsequential and sterile, a bit like weighing your life in coffee spoons. I asked Ortberg and Wright again about the value in quantifying spiritual information. They emphasized that the surveys are not only helpful for individuals; the aggregated results produce a useful data set for people who research everything from gratitude to physical exercise and emotional wellness.
Over two thousand users had started the survey, Wright said, while around fifteen hundred have completed it. Their target is ten thousand users. He also told me that SoulPulse is prepared to extend the survey to other religious communities, where individual houses of worship could receive a standardized report for their congregations. “This will be great for churches,” he said. “It’s like going to a Ferrari from a bicycle in terms of the information we can offer about their spiritual life.”
Wright directed me to a preliminary report on daily fluctuations in spirituality. Among the first fifteen hundred respondents, the SoulPulse team found that spiritual awareness peaked in the morning and decreased throughout the day, was least present when participants were resting and most present when participants were listening to music or praying, and had little association with sleep quantity but a near-linear correlation with sleep quality. These are only initial results, and Wright emphasized that SoulPulse will continue to recruit participants and gather data until at least 2016.
A few weeks after my test run, when I returned to my spirituality report, I thought again of those drops after meals, most noticeably around one in the afternoon. I had learned to pray before meals, but never after; SoulPulse had shown me, day after day, that the period after a meal might be exactly when I needed to pray. Ortberg told me something similar about his own experience, when he realized that his spirituality tended to peak when he was alone. He made more time for solitary prayer and reflection, even though his ministry requires a great deal of public work. “Our capacity for self-deception is huge,” he said. “So finding ways to become more self-aware can be really worthwhile.”
