I went to an art gallery and had my mind read

It’s not often I feel that self-conscious in galleries, but there I was, at The Courtauld Gallery, walking around wearing a wireless headset recording my brainwaves as I tried to admire the paintings. Across the room was a crowd of PRs, press and members of the public watching a 40-inch monitor displaying a data visualisation of my innermost thoughts and memories. I was genuinely worried; what were they seeing, and what did they think of me?

The EEG (electroencephalogram) headset was courtesy of the Art Fund, and the data visualisation was thanks to creative agency The Mill. Their idea was to highlight the benefits of visiting art galleries by scientifically demonstrating art’s impact on people’s brains and emotions.

Before I put the headset on, Will McNeil, creative director of The Mill, explained to me how their program turns the raw data into graphics. First, it isolates the beta waves, the high-frequency, low-amplitude waves that show you’re alive and awake. Then, it looks for patterns that scientists believe represent different ways of thinking: the ribbons would grow wider with more intense thought, they would corkscrew if I was trying to make sense of something, and they would glow if I recognised something I’d seen before.

I wanted to put on a good show for my audience, so I started out with Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folie Bergere (1882). It’s one of my favourites, it’s one of the all-time greats, it’s a painting you have to think about. At first, it looks fairly straightforward, almost like a photograph, but then you notice that nothing’s quite right: there’s a mirror, but the reflections are all wrong, the bottles are in the wrong place, and where did that man come from? Is it a real scene, or is it the daydreams of a bored bar girl?

I moved on to Leon Kossoff’s Shell Building Site (1962), another difficult painting. You really have to work with this one. The paint is thick  like folds of meringue. If you look at it long enough you might just be able to make out the form of a tower block. But it’s also emotive. It always reminds me of the sludge and mud of wet London winters.

I carried on walking around the gallery, really looking, really thinking about everything I saw. When I glanced back at the monitor, my brainwaves were all over the place. I was suddenly struck by the memory of the French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, AKA Stendhal, who in 1817 visited the Italian city of Florence and felt “great ecstasy” when he saw the art of the Basilica of Santa Croce. Stendhal described feeling weak at the knees – literally – because of its “sublime beauty.” In the 1970s, an Italian psychiatrist identified “Stendhal Syndrome” after a number of tourists collapsed, fainted, felt nauseous, and even suffered heart attacks while viewing great works of art. My heart was racing now, my head was pulsing, and my audience must have wondered what was going on. Was I going to faint?

I spoke to Dr Ahmad Beyh, who specialises in the neurological study of beauty. In his professional opinion, is it possible that paintings could be so beautiful that they could kill? The doc doubted it. In any case, his research is focused on finding a biological basis for the idea of beauty. He said studies have shown that an area at the front of the brain, the medial orbital frontal cortex, and at the back of the brain, the occipital lobe, show heightened activity when recognising beautiful things; whether that’s faces, landscapes, music or art.

There’s something unnerving about finding out that, as far as my brain’s concerned, every single seemingly unique experience is pretty much the same. I know I’m flesh and blood, and in my gut, I know it’s true, but it feels wrong! Science can tell us a lot about what our bodies are doing (my brain recognised something ‘beautiful’) but why did it think it was beautiful? How did that beauty compare to other beautiful things? There’s a limit to what science can tell us, but don’t let that get you down. Instead, just go to a gallery and decide for yourself.