The Mind Becomes Capital

From cognitive health to cognitive security, cognitive liberty and the emerging Brain Economy

For decades, economists and strategists have tried to describe the less tangible assets that make societies prosperous. Human capital named the knowledge, skills and experience people bring to an economy. Social capital named the networks and trust that allow communities and organisations to function. Intellectual capital named the ideas and expertise that generate value for institutions.

Now another form of capital is entering economic and political thinking: Brain Capital.

It refers not simply to the value of intelligence or education but to the combined value of brain health and brain skills, our capacity to think, learn, adapt, create and collaborate, and to remain cognitively capable throughout our lives.

This might sound like another management concept designed to persuade organisations that their people are their greatest asset. Something more consequential is happening. Brain Capital is becoming the subject of investment strategies, policy proposals and measurement frameworks. A Global Brain Economy Initiative has been established, economists are building national and regional Brain Capital indices, and financial specialists are developing what they call brain-lens investing. The underlying proposition is that the human brain should be treated as a foundational contributor to economic prosperity.

It is a potentially transformative idea. It also raises questions about agency, autonomy and the ownership of human cognitive capability. If the brain becomes capital, who gets to manage it?

From human capital to Brain Capital

The language of capital denotes that something of human or social significance is identified, assigned economic value and folded into a framework through which organisations or governments make decisions.

The translation can be enormously productive. Recognising human capital encouraged investment in education and skills. Recognising social capital showed that development depends on relationships, trust and institutions as well as physical infrastructure. Intellectual capital helped organisations see that knowledge could generate value beyond their material assets. But each translation also changes the thing being described. Knowledge becomes an economic resource, relationships become networks that generate returns, and expertise becomes an organisational asset.

Brain Capital takes the logic further. Rather than concentrating on what a person knows or produces, it directs economic attention towards the cognitive capacities that make those contributions possible. It moves closer to the person.

The concept has a longer history than the current discussion suggests. In October 2020 a group of researchers including the physician-scientist Harris Eyre published “A Brain Capital Grand Strategy: toward economic reimagination” in Molecular Psychiatry. Its ambition was a coordinated approach across public and private institutions to recognise, protect and develop brain capital, and to measure progress. The authors proposed a Brain Capital Investment Plan, a cross-government approach called Brain Capital in All Policies, and a Brain Capital Index. They also modelled how brain capital might figure in corporate accounting, though proposals for putting it on company balance sheets remained at that modelling stage.

This was not simply a manifesto for healthier brains. It was a proposal to reorganise how societies value cognition. In 2026, parts of that programme are acquiring institutional form.

The Brain Economy arrives

In January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Rice University announced the Global Brain Economy Initiative. Developed with the University of Texas Medical Branch and the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative, and led by Eyre, it aims to connect neuroscience, economic policy, workforce development, investment and human well-being. In June, Eyre, Rym Ayadi and colleagues announced in Nature Medicine a commission to define, measure and operationalise brain health and cognitive capacity as contributors to economic resilience.

The Davos announcement coincided with a World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute report, The Human Advantage: Stronger Brains in the Age of AI, which argues that economic competitiveness increasingly depends on supporting brain health and cultivating cognitive, emotional and social capabilities.

It is easy to see why the argument is gaining traction. Artificial intelligence is changing the relationship between human cognitive effort and economic output. As machines take on more analytical, linguistic and administrative work, complementary human capabilities such as adaptability, creativity, empathy, judgement and complex problem-solving are being revalued. Meanwhile ageing populations, neurological illness and mental-health difficulties carry enormous individual and societal costs. The Brain Economy agenda brings these together: the economic necessity of maintaining cognitive health and the strategic importance of human capability in an increasingly automated world. The WEF and McKinsey report estimates that better implementation of proven brain-health interventions could produce $6.2 trillion in global economic gains by 2050.

That is a substantial case for investment. But two different ways of understanding the brain are at work here.

One recognises that healthy cognition makes flourishing, participation and prosperity possible.

The other treats cognitive capacity as an asset to be optimised for economic return. They can coexist, but they are not the same.

The first begins with the well-being of the person; the second with the value cognition generates for a system. As investment and measurement frameworks develop, that difference in starting point will matter more and more.

From productivity monitoring to cognitive monitoring

Since at least 2022, my trends presentations have included the proposition that cognitive health would become a growing organisational concern, and more specifically that workplace measurement would shift from organisational productivity towards individual productivity measured through cognitive data. Attention, fatigue and mental workload would become potential objects of continuous assessment.

Organisations have always measured output: how much a factory produces, how quickly a task is completed, how well a team performs. Cognitive measurement promises something different. Instead of measuring the productive results of work, an organisation may begin measuring the cognitive condition of the person doing it.

At Snapchat’s technology conference in 2022 I raised workplace brain-machine interfaces as an underestimated development, asking how employers might gain access to employees’ neural data as technologies promising cognitive augmentation became commercially attractive.

In March 2023 I returned to the question with Duke University’s Nita Farahany on The Future of You, in an episode called “Brain Data and the Sovereign Self”, and I spoke with developers of consumer brain-computer interfaces, including Neurable and Neurosity, about the commercial uses of neural data. What interested me then, and still does, was the movement from measuring external performance to interpreting internal cognitive states.

An employee’s productivity cannot be reduced to brain activity. Neural measurements are incomplete and context-dependent, and they cannot give an infallible account of what someone is thinking or what their contribution is worth. Yet the attraction is understandable. Technology that could warn of dangerous fatigue or cognitive overload, and recommend rest before mistakes become likely, could have real benefits in aviation, healthcare and transport.

The challenge is not measurement itself but what the measurement becomes.

A tool meant to protect employees can become a means of evaluating them. Data intended to support rest can become evidence of poor performance. A voluntary cognitive-health programme becomes hard to refuse when promotion or employment depends on taking part. That is why I have long treated cognitive health as an organisational trend and cognitive monitoring as an emerging governance problem. The difference between monitoring productivity and monitoring the person producing it is fundamental, and Brain Capital makes it newly significant.

When cognitive health becomes a corporate metric

One of the most interesting developments is in Houston. Project Metis, led by the Center for Houston’s Future with support from institutions including Rice University, is attempting to build a regional model for a Brain Economy, bringing together healthcare, education, government, employers, researchers and investors to strengthen brain health and cognitive capability.

It is doing more than raising awareness. It is building the infrastructure to measure Brain Capital. Its U.S. Brain Capital Index already compares states and counties on indicators of brain health, brain skills and the conditions that support them. Alongside it, Project Metis is developing a Corporate Brain Capital Index to help organisations understand workforce brain health, track progress over time and examine how investment relates to well-being, retention and performance.

Both are population-level tools, and the corporate index is still under development. It would be wrong to present either as evidence that companies are routinely reading employees’ brains. Measuring a workforce’s overall well-being and analysing an individual’s neural activity involve different technologies, risks and governance questions. But they sit on a related trajectory.

First cognitive health is recognised as important.

Then it enters workforce strategy.

Then metrics are developed to prove its contribution to performance and value.

Once a characteristic becomes measurable, the possibility of managing it changes. Once organisations manage it, decisions about standards, incentives and control become unavoidable. The question is not whether cognitive health deserves investment; clearly it does. It is whether the resulting frameworks will mainly help people protect and develop their own cognitive capabilities, or help institutions assess those capabilities against objectives defined elsewhere.

From health and skills to investable assets

Finance is the other dimension. The Brain-Lens Investing consultation paper, published in 2025, sets out three strategies: directing investment towards activities that strengthen Brain Capital, incorporating Brain Capital into financial risk assessment, and institutionalising it across financial decision-making. This is not yet an established asset class with common standards. It is a developing framework that seeks to influence how capital is allocated.

Its direction is revealing nonetheless. The health of a population has traditionally been the responsibility of public health systems, social institutions and individuals. The Brain Economy proposes that it should also be an explicit concern of investors and economic development agencies. A pension fund might one day be encouraged to weigh the cognitive well-being of workforces and communities when judging long-term resilience. A city might attract investment partly on its capacity to support brain health and skills. A corporation might seek to demonstrate that its working practices improve employees’ cognitive functioning.

There are compelling possibilities here, including stronger incentives to prevent neurological illness, reduce workplace harm and invest in human development over longer horizons. The danger lies in assuming that every human capability must show an economic return before it deserves protection. Some of the most important uses of the mind are not productive in any conventional sense: contemplation, play, solitude, imagination without purpose, the freedom to think thoughts that lead nowhere measurable. They may eventually produce social, cultural or economic value, but that is not why they matter. They matter because they are part of what it means to be human.

Four related ideas

I find it useful to separate four ideas that are becoming entangled.

Cognitive health is the maintenance and development of healthy cognitive functioning across a lifetime: the neurological and psychological well-being that lets us think, learn and remember.

Cognitive security is the protection of cognitive processes, and of the environments in which we form judgements, against manipulation, deception and coercion.

Cognitive liberty is the individual’s freedom to think independently, keep their mental life private and resist unwanted interference or extraction.

Cognitive capital, closely related to the policy concept of Brain Capital, is the value assigned to cognitive capabilities within economic and institutional systems.

Put simply, cognitive health asks whether we can think well. Cognitive security asks whether the conditions in which we think remain trustworthy. Cognitive liberty asks whether our thinking remains our own. Cognitive capital asks how our thinking creates value.

The fourth changes the stakes of the other three. When something becomes valuable to an institution, protecting it can also become a justification for managing it, and there is no guarantee that institutional definitions of cognitive optimisation will match individual definitions of flourishing.

The strategic importance of cognitive security

The Brain Economy also intersects with work in defence, intelligence and security. Cognitive warfare, influence operations and hybrid conflict increasingly target the environments in which people perceive information, interpret events and make decisions. The aim is often not to persuade someone of a proposition but to undermine confidence, overload attention, exploit emotion, distort perceived reality or degrade independent judgement.

Here cognition matters for a different reason. An economy wants cognitively capable people because they contribute to prosperity. A security institution wants to protect cognitive autonomy because compromised judgement weakens individual and collective decision-making. Both now treat human cognition as a strategic concern.

The convergence exposes a gap. A society could invest heavily in brain health and education while exposing its citizens to relentless manipulation, algorithmic overload and degraded information. Its population might be neurologically healthy and increasingly vulnerable at the same time. A company might invest in employee well-being while deploying systems that intensify cognitive demands, narrow the room for independent judgement or encourage workers to hand more of their thinking to AI.

Brain health alone does not guarantee cognitive autonomy. An investment strategy that ignores the wider decision environment risks confusing the capacity to perform with the freedom to think. Cognitive security is therefore no supplementary consideration. It concerns the integrity of the conditions in which Brain Capital is exercised.

Cognitive liberty: the missing principle?

When I interviewed Nita Farahany in 2023, what particularly interested me was her argument for cognitive liberty. Her book The Battle for Your Brain examined technologies that could increasingly collect and interpret brain activity, and our conversation turned on the difference between accessing one piece of neural information and retaining the underlying data from which further inferences might later be drawn.

A system designed to detect fatigue may collect data that later proves useful for other kinds of inference. The original purpose does not determine every future use. That makes neural data different from an ordinary productivity score, and it makes consent more complicated than asking an employee to agree to wear a device. What exactly have they agreed to? Who can access the data? Can it be reanalysed as interpretive tools improve? Can it be shared with insurers or other third parties? Does refusing carry professional consequences?

These questions should not wait until workplace neurotechnology is ubiquitous, and the legal and ethical discussion is already under way. In November 2025 UNESCO adopted its Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology, an international normative framework with safeguards for mental privacy, autonomy and informed consent. Particularly important is its recognition that people should be able to refuse or withdraw consent, including where power is unequal. The recommendation is not binding domestic law, but it introduces a principle that belongs at the centre of the Brain Economy debate. The economic value of cognition must not supersede the individual’s authority over their own mind. Cognitive liberty cannot be a reward for being cognitively productive. It has to be a condition under which cognitive capability is developed and used.

System & Self: who is the brain for?

This brings me back to a question that has shaped much of my work. Who gets to decide?

My System & Self framework explores the relationship between the structures that shape our lives and the individual’s capacity to understand, navigate and influence them. The Brain Economy is an unusually clear example. The system identifies cognition as economically consequential, then builds institutions, indices and incentives to improve it, along with standards against which success can be judged and investment justified.

These arrangements could improve lives considerably. But the individual is not simply the object of the intervention. A person has their own purposes and values, and their own sense of what a meaningful life should be. A system may value adaptability because it makes the workforce resilient to technological change; an individual may value it because it lets them leave an unsuitable job, challenge an institution or choose a life the economy doesn’t particularly reward. A system may value attention because focused workers produce better results; an individual may value it because it lets them read, reflect, imagine, form relationships and direct their consciousness towards something freely chosen. The capability is the same. The ends are not.

The system can have an interest in strengthening the self without acquiring the right to decide what the self is for.

The Brain Economy might encourage governments to build healthier environments, corporations to abandon harmful working practices and investors to take the long-term value of cognitive well-being seriously. Those would be real achievements. But the project should not be judged only by the economic output that follows. It should also be judged by whether people gain greater capacity to exercise agency over their own lives. Are they better able to think independently, to make meaningful choices, to resist coercion?

When the brain is reclassified as economic infrastructure, someone has to decide what its value consists of and whose interests its optimisation serves. If that decision is left to indices, investors and institutions alone, we will have built an economy that is very good at improving minds and rather less interested in whose minds they are.

The mind may well become capital. It must still belong to the person who thinks with it.