Today’s attention economy and the wider digital environment are driving ever fiercer competition for human attention and eating away at what economists describe as our “mental productivity”: concentration, deep thinking and creativity. Scientific evidence already shows that heavy use of digital technology can weaken sustained attention, disrupt emotional and social development, foster behavioural addiction and disturb sleep. A recent meta-analysis links excessive screen time with ADHD‑compatible symptoms, and there is evidence of this relationship in both adolescents and adults. OECD data add a sobering classroom detail: three quarters of students in OECD countries spend more than an hour a day on social networks, and almost one in three report being distracted by digital devices in class.
Brain capital
This is an economic story as much as a neurological one. Drawing on research led by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, average time spent on a screen before switching has fallen from around two and a half minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds, and it can take roughly 23 minutes to regain focus after an interruption. A Basex Research report estimated that needless interruptions consume 28% of a knowledge worker’s day, at an annual cost of about $588bn in the United States alone. Put plainly: the friction is now systemic.
That is where an increasingly influential idea comes in: brain capital. Championed by the Brain Capital Alliance and developed in academic work since 2021, it treats cognitive health and brain skills as a strategic economic asset, not merely a healthcare concern. Since last January, the Global Brain Capital Index has offered a composite measure of countries’ brain health, cognitive skills and the enabling environments that support them—giving governments and investors a comparable metric for policy, investment and governance choices.
Hybrid intelligence
Early results point to overall improvement, but the distribution is lopsided. Lower‑income countries are narrowing gaps on the enabling conditions, yet brain health itself remains under‑diagnosed and under‑resourced across much of the world. OECD countries still tend to lead on infrastructure and skills, but they are hardly insulated from the cognitive harms associated with intensive, poorly governed technology use.
Alongside the Index, the McKinsey Health Institute and the World Economic Forum published The Human Advantage: Stronger Brains in the Age of AI, estimating that scaling effective brain‑health interventions could avert 267 million disability‑adjusted life years and add up to $6.2tn in cumulative GDP by 2050. This is also where “hybrid intelligence” starts to look less like a slogan and more like a design principle: organisations that invest in cognitive health while deploying advanced tools can reserve scarce human attention for judgement, innovation and difficult decisions—while machines absorb the routine. It may be the simplest equation for protecting brain capital in practice.
This article is republished from Futuribles. Here's the original article in Spanish and English.
