This summer, ice cream innovators Ben & Jerry’s have teamed up with the British Museum of Food to show for the first time what happens inside your head as you eat ice cream – through the medium of laser.

The installation brings to life the moment when ice cream delights the taste buds and lights up the brain’s pleasure centres, and creates a laser display unique to each and every guest.

Visitors to SCOOP: A Wonderful Ice Cream World, will be treated to a complimentary scoop of the Ben & Jerry’s Moo-phoria light ice cream – light in calories, heavy on flavour – and their brain waves will be monitored with a special headset linked to a laser display unit.

Flavour fans can literally see how good ice cream tastes. The installation runs until 31st September 2018 at Gasholders London, Kings Cross.

The light display has been created with the help of the clever cookies over at Bompas & Parr and the Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs to celebrate the lightness of new Moo-phoria light ice cream – a concoction that’s light on the calories but full of flavour and packed with the chunks and swirls that fans know and love.

The system works by monitoring the brain’s electrical activity, similar to an electroencephalogram (EEG) that measures voltage fluctuations within the neurons of the brain. As the brain is evolutionary conditioned to respond to sweetness as an energy source, ice cream is the perfect vehicle to display how the brain is stimulated by such taste stimuli, generating powerfully pleasurable emotional reactions through with the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward.

When a visitor takes a mouthful of Moo-Phoria, the headset detects the increased brain activity immediately and the effect on the laser display is appreciable, with the ‘resting’ laser display (before  the guest has eaten ice cream) transforming into dramatic animated and colourful peaks and spikes once they have taken their first lick.

The exhibition is part of the British Museum of Food’s SCOOP, a celebration of ice cream throughout the ages and an exploration of the science, psychology and chemistry of ice cream, including ice cream weather, glow in the dark scoops and a hundreds and thousands fountain.