The V&A London, home to 145 galleries of works from across the globe, spanning 5,000 years of art. Museums like this are always looking at new ways to engage audiences. One idea here to see how our brains react to what we're seeing.

We often talk about how art makes us feel or what it gets us thinking about. Well, today, it's time for a way of quantifying that.

So we're just going to put this on your head here. Okay. It just goes behind your ears.

This Muse headset, which would more commonly be used as a meditation device, has been repurposed to translate brain activity into a real-time 3D visualization.

And this has four EEG sensors?

That's right. Four sensors that are on your forehead are picking up the electromagnetic activity off your brain.

Okay, and what does that mean it's going to learn from me?

It's going to take this raw data right off your headset. Our set-up processes it in lots of different ways, which indicate what your brain is doing when you're looking at the art.

When the brain recognizes something in the visual input, for example, a face or an object, like a tool or anything like that, there are certain signatures in the signal that we can pick up. And what the Art Fund and the Mill have done is use these signals or recognize these signals in a dynamic way when the person is wearing the headset to display them in that visualization in 3D form, dynamically while the person is engaging with art.

I've only just identified that there's women dancing there.

It aims to show that art isn't a passive experience.

What we wanted to show people was that when you go to a gallery a museum and you see things that you recognize or that are challenging or inspiring or create joy in you, that actually it absolutely has an effect on your brain.

Interesting. I know what I'm looking at now, but how do I feel? Do I like it? Does it make me feel happy? Sad? I'm not sure that I feel that much, apart from satisfaction that I finally recognize that they're dancers. I guess I'll find out. Let's move on to something lively. How about this one? There's a lot of green. There's a lot to think about here. A lot of detail, looking at the painting of the hands. Hands are definitely hard to do. And the book with the writing that's blurred. The plants There's a lot going on, but it's very clear what everything is. There's no great moment of revelation like there was in the last one. It feels more upbeat. In reality, when you look at the picture, you try and think of all the sensible things, but then you get distracted. Her nails look like they were painted, but they couldn't have been. How does that affect what this is reading?

Let's find out what it did discover.

Well, this all looks very pretty, but what does it actually represent?

What you can see here is what we call corkscrewing. And you can see the ribbons are starting to twist over each other and twist and bend. And that's due to problem solving. You're trying to make sense of what you're seeing.

This was when I was looking at the daygar. Things seem to have got a little bit more excitable at this point. What does that mean?

These golden highlights that are coming in are something that we've put into the system, and they're triggered by recognition when you see something that you recognize.

That'll be the point that I saw the ladies for the first time that looked like a blur initially.

And then some other things are happening. Like we've isolated the beta range in your brainwave spectrum, and that's what's making the ribbons get fatter. And then we've got two-And what does that mean? Probably means you're concentrating. It's the beta range in the brainwave spectrum is conscious thought.

Right. The second picture had a very Very different feel to it. But what I'm looking at here doesn't look that dissimilar.

I can agree. It does look a little bit the same, but what we're not seeing is lots of weaving and corkscroing. What we're seeing is just nice up and down patterns, occasionally some gold highlights. I think in general, what I'd say is you looked at this painting and it didn't feel unfamiliar to you or odd. You looked at it and you were quite comfortable with it.

It was clear what it was of.

Yeah, exactly. You may have seen it before as well.

What have you learned so far from people using this?

The biggest variation is from one person to another. Huge differences between the way one person takes in a piece of art and another. Particularly neurodiverse people, people with things like ADHD, have a very different reaction to art. They spend a lot more time reassessing the image and that stuff. We learned that as we were doing our tests.

I suppose as somebody who's not hugely into art, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I seemingly did feel.

We know that all types of visual art, for example, will engage to engage the brain in a very similar way, and that's to engage the visual sensory part of the brain. These are signals that the brain is experiencing pretty much the entire time when we're experiencing the world around us. But in the context of art experience, I would say it goes a little further in the sense that we're also interested in this context and things like the emotional state of the person and maybe inducing some positive experience in the person.

Although it's early days, maybe this research could ultimately prove that art is actually good for you..