In a Manchester art gallery, a quiet room with just three paintings is starting a mental health movement aimed at reclaiming our lost attention spans.

There's a small, dark green room in Manchester Art Gallery, right next to a packed gallery of L S Lowry's stick figures and factory buildings. While people mill around in the bright space, as busy as the artist's workers outside the city's factories, in the dark green room they slow right down. They sit and look at the three paintings on the wall and really see them. Guided by a downloadable meditation, visitors are encouraged to spend up to 15 minutes with their chosen artwork, one on one.

In a world where demands for our eyeballs dominate and attention is the resource, this single-minded space, called Room to Breathe, is a place where you can regain your focus. It's all part of the Mindful Museum Campaign led by museum consultant Louise Thompson.

Over the past 12 years, Thompson has worked as the health and wellbeing manager at Manchester Art Gallery, developing the idea of a mindful museum, and she now consults with museums around the world. Her radical view is that a museum or art gallery are not just a place to store and exhibit items, but a public space where you can improve your mental health.

"Museums are places where social connection thrives in lots of ways," she explains. "They're also spaces where we foster connection with our identity, through seeing objects in museums, which helps us grow a sense of ourselves and of belonging."

"The act of learning, which we find in museums, increases our confidence, our self-worth, our self-esteem, and it's a really big boost for mental health."

The other thing that happens in museums and galleries, she says, is that we take notice of the objects and the collections. That act of taking notice is all about being in the present moment – a cornerstone of mindfulness meditation.

Sitting in the dark green room, I try it for myself. I take in the abstract lines, grey tones and mustard yellow of a Ben Nicholson still life, guided by a recording that asks me to breathe in and out, to notice what draws my attention and what I like and dislike.

The more I look, the more I see. The painting isn't as abstract as I first thought: shadows and shapes emerge; the edge of a cup, the curve of a plate. I feel much calmer than in the previous room where I'd felt animated and energised, looking at multiple paintings for a second or so at a time.

"It is an act between you and the object," says Thompson. "As a practitioner, you invite people in and ask them to sit and look at the object, guiding them to notice the formal elements within it."

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