Why building brain capital is the key to ageing well

As I deep-dive (professionally and personally!) into ageing, I have become fascinated with the concept of cognitive reserve, which is the theory for how some of our brains can better buffer the impact of ageing and preserve our cognitive abilities. You can work on your cognitive reserve as you age, but we accumulate cognitive reserve across our lifespan so those who get a head start from childhood reap the dividends.

Investing in brains from the get-go makes sense as it is now thought that there are many interventions we can make to help protect us against cognitive decline and dementia, better prevent, treat or cure neurological disorders and promote later-life brain health and mental wellness. The 2024 update of the Lancet Commission on dementia explains how age-related dementia incidences decrease due to a combination of greater cognitive and physical reserve developed across the life course.

When InnovationAus sent out a call for papers asking people to share ambitions for a new industrial age towards “a future made in Australia”, it was obvious to me that I had to fly a flag for the brilliant minds, some of them Australian, at work developing ways to measure the value of nations through the generative value of brains. My InnovationAus paper addresses how we can prioritise our brain health and skills by leveraging our comparative advantage in neuroscience and neurotech. Harris Eyre co-authored a recent paper, Life-Course Brain Health as a Determinant of Late-Life Mental Health which concludes that “To optimize global brain health, we need transdisciplinary science to deepen our understanding of the dissoluble links between neurology, brain function, and mental health.”

The concept of Brain Capital assigns a value to our brains, each and every brain. It also serves as an umbrella term for all things brainy – our cognitive skills and our brain health. This concept has the potential to redefine how we measure the wealth of a nation, placing mental wealth at the forefront.

One of the things that attracted me to the concept of Brain Capital is its approach to treating brains as an investment, not a cost. Imagine the impact when we truly recognise our collective brains – their cognitive skills alongside their health – as our biggest asset. How can the mental wealth of a nation be the ultimate prize?

Our Chief Scientist, Cathy Foley launched the InnovationAus Industry Papers with an ambitious plan for building an Australian Quantum ecosystem driven by talented people. Education, retraining and reskilling of brains is essential for the well-being of displaced workforces to thrive in the green, care and digital economic transitions we are undergoing and make the most of the almost twenty years we have seen added to our life expectancy versus that of our grandparents’ generation. Investing in brains is also the key to innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, and building competitive advantage, as in the case of quantum.

After the launch’s formalities ended, I had a clever entrepreneur tell me they had taken a step back from their groundbreaking company in recent years due to the toll stress was having on their mental health; a clever woman told me how much she worried about her children and the effect of drugs on their brains; and a man tells me how much time he was spending caring for his elderly mother suffering the early stages of dementia. Brain Capital is a theoretical concept – but it is also a daily one. Brains are our everyday – and they are our tomorrow.