Brain Token: What If Learning Became a Form of Currency?

During my internship at Microsoft Research, I had an interesting conversation with my friend Eric Cui, whose background is in blockchain and fintech. My own work focuses on brain-computer interfaces and neural foundation models.

We joked that instead of spending another AI token, maybe we should use our free “brain token.” Behind the joke was a concern that feels increasingly real: in the pursuit of efficiency, we are losing the time and incentive to understand things deeply. We are outsourcing the cognitive effort we once had to make ourselves. When there is always another agent to run or output to produce, learning can begin to feel like a delay rather than the point.

That conversation led to a simple hypothesis:

What if the effort we invest in learning could become a form of value?

Capitalism has historically attached currency to productivity. Labor creates measurable output, and currency assigns value to that output. Learning sits underneath this system: it makes future productivity possible, but rarely counts as productive labor on its own.

Because learning is not directly valued, it is easily reframed as a matter of individual willpower. People are expected to study after work, keep up with new tools, and become more capable on their own time. Under pressure to produce, many will eventually abandon the slower process of learning—not because they lack curiosity, but because the economic structure rewards its outcome while ignoring the effort that creates it.

AI intensifies this mismatch. Senior researchers can use AI effectively because they already possess the knowledge needed to judge its output. Junior researchers still need time to build that knowledge, yet the same tools raise expectations for immediate productivity. The more efficient AI becomes, the harder it can be to justify the time required to understand something deeply.

Brain Token

Recent advances in wearable neurotechnology make it increasingly possible to estimate aspects of cognitive effort/load from biosignals (e.g., more gamma power, blood oxygenation concentration rate). This suggests a speculative concept I call Brain Token: a digital token representing verified effort devoted to learning.

The deeper idea is not simply to add another reward for studying. It is to ask whether the definition of labor itself could change.

As physical AI and robotics replace more of the labor that currency has traditionally valued, human work may no longer need to be defined primarily by physical production or immediate output. Cognitive effort—the work of learning, reasoning, and expanding one’s own capacity—could become part of what the economy recognizes as labor. A measure of cognitive load could serve as one imperfect accounting primitive for that effort.

That would invert the current structure. Today, learning sits beneath labor, labor produces output, and output earns currency. What if currency were instead grounded in the learning and effort that make future work possible? Learning would no longer be an invisible prerequisite sustained by personal discipline alone. It would occupy a visible place in the structure of value itself.

This way, companies would gain an incentive to develop junior talent, while early-career researchers could devote time to learning without having to justify it through immediate output.

This idea should never become a system that monitors or evaluates people based on brain activity. Brain signals are imperfect, people think differently, and creativity cannot be reduced to a neural metric.

If such a system ever existed, participation would need to be voluntary and privacy-preserving, with the data and any resulting tokens entirely owned by the individual. Brain activity should never determine someone’s salary, opportunities, or worth.

Brain Token is ultimately less about inventing a token than about redefining labor for an era in which machines perform an increasing share of production. If productivity is no longer uniquely human, perhaps currency should not recognize only what we produce. Perhaps it should also recognize the effort through which we continue to change what we are capable of producing.

Maybe the future currency isn’t intelligence.

Maybe it’s the willingness to invest effort into becoming more intelligent.