I do not have a crystal ball. However, based on what I learned last week, 2026 could well become the year of the Brain Economy. When major players such as the OECD, UNESCO, the World Economic Forum and McKinsey begin to embrace an idea. The chances are real.

So what exactly is the Brain Economy? The concept is clearly articulated in a recent article by Harris Eyre and a large group of co-authors. It starts from a simple but uncomfortable observation. Our economy increasingly depends on cognitive, emotional and social capacities. While at the same time systematically putting pressure on those very capacities. In classical economic models, brains remain remarkably abstract. People appear as workers, consumers or carriers of “human capital”, but rarely as vulnerable, trainable and influenceable biological systems. That is precisely the blind spot the concept of the Brain Economy seeks to correct.

At its core lies the idea of Brain Capital. This concept brings together two elements that are usually treated separately. On the one hand, we have brain health, including mental health, neurological conditions and cognitive decline. On the other hand, there are also brain skills, such as problem-solving, creativity, self-regulation, learning capacity and social cognition. Together, they form a type of core economic capital, comparable to infrastructure or productive assets, but fundamentally human. Without healthy, well-developed brains, there is little room for innovation, cooperation, or the steering of complex systems.

The authors explicitly place this argument against the backdrop of what they describe as a polycrisis. Climate change, democratic erosion, disinformation, mental health problems, low productivity growth and rapid technological change reinforce one another. These problems are not merely external shocks to the economy; they are, at least in part, produced by its own logic. An economy that structurally generates mental overload, increases cognitive inequality and treats attention as a commodity ultimately undermines its own foundations.

Technological developments, and generative AI in particular, sharpen this tension. On the one hand, they increase the cognitive leverage of individuals. Routine tasks disappear, complex analyses become more accessible and knowledge circulates faster. On the other hand, work becomes hyper-cognitive. It is less physical and less repetitive, but mentally more demanding. This raises the bar for concentration, flexibility, learning and emotional resilience. Those who struggle with this fall out sooner. From the perspective of the Brain Economy, productivity in such a context cannot be separated from brain health.

At the same time, these technologies are becoming increasingly effective at influencing human behaviour. Personalised algorithms, social media and synthetic voices or faces enable large-scale cognitive manipulation. The authors explicitly refer to cognitive warfare, understood as the deliberate undermining of trust, shared knowledge and mental resilience as a strategic objective. Brain health thus becomes not only a social or economic issue, but also a democratic and geopolitical one.

The proposed shift is therefore broad. In policy terms, the authors argue for systematically considering brain impact across domains such as education, work, digital regulation, healthcare, urban planning and climate policy. Not as an additional layer of well-being rhetoric, but as a core criterion. What does this policy do to cognitive development, stress, attention and social connectedness across the life course?

Measurement, too, needs to change. Gross Domestic Product tells us little about mental resilience or cognitive reserves. This is why the authors propose Brain Capital dashboards that bring together indicators of brain health, skills, and contextual factors such as education, living environments, and social relationships. This aligns with broader movements towards well-being and beyond-GDP frameworks, while adding an explicitly neurocognitive perspective.

It is also essential to be clear about what the Brain Economy does not claim. It does not offer simple causal stories, such as “invest X in mental health, and productivity will rise by Y per cent”, nor quick fixes. On the contrary, it emphasises long-term investment, systems thinking and policy coordination across sectors. The authors are strikingly explicit that short-term logics, whether political or financial, sit uneasily with the nature of brain development and protection.

At the same time, imho, the Brain Economy forces an uncomfortable question into view, one that enthusiasm too often pushes aside. By framing the brain as economic capital, the concept risks turning protection into instrumentation once again. Policymakers and organisations may start valuing brain health and cognitive skills not because they enable human flourishing, but because they boost productivity, innovation or geopolitical resilience. In that logic, care for the brain becomes legitimate mainly when it delivers economic returns. I see a clear parallel with calls for more mindfulness at work, offered as a remedy, while the organisational conditions that generate excessive cognitive strain remain untouched.

This tension is hardly new. Do we want an economy that adjusts to human limits, or people who are continually reshaped to meet economic demands? Without explicit normative choices, the Brain Economy can easily drift into a more sophisticated form of optimisation pressure. Instead of reducing cognitive load, it trains people to manage it better, to focus longer, recover faster and endure more, not for the sake of humanity, but to keep the system running.

The strength of the concept, therefore, lies not only in what it adds but also in what it forces us to make explicit. A genuine Brain Economy requires more than new indicators or investment frameworks. It calls for a public conversation about which forms of cognitive functioning we want to promote, which we do not, and who has the right to set those boundaries. Without that conversation, the risk remains that we finally place our brains at the centre, only to forget, once again, why.