Before You Learned the Value of Money, Who Taught Your Brain to Trust It?

Decolonial Neuroscience, pre-language, debt, interest rates, Drex Cidadão, and new possibilities for well-being.

1. Money Does Not Yet Exist for This Child

Imagine a two-year-old child waiting for food.

The child knows nothing about interest rates, banks, inflation, or public debt.

But the child recognizes approaching people, notices who usually provides care, and learns relationships between waiting, needs, and satisfaction.

The child's organism builds expectations before being able to explain them verbally.

Now imagine that child at four years old, accompanying an adult to the supermarket.

The adult taps a card against a payment terminal.

Numbers appear.

Food is taken home.

The child may begin to understand that this gesture helps obtain important things.

But where did those numbers come from?

Why can some families buy food while others must decide what to leave on the shelves?

Before understanding money, we are already learning how the world distributes possibilities.

2. What Do We Learn Before Words?

Developmental neuroscience investigates how caregiving, learning, and social interactions contribute to the formation of expectations and emotional regulation.

During the early years, children begin recognizing exchanges, ownership, sharing, and differences between needs and desires.

This does not mean they already understand monetary mechanisms.

Nor does it justify claiming that poverty inevitably determines a child's neurological future.

At BrainLatam, we propose investigating pre-language as a field of experience from which later classifications emerge.

Science, Politics, Religion, and Economics do not exist as fully formed institutions in the newborn brain.

But learning regularities, negotiating relationships, assigning meaning, and using resources involve capacities that precede these names.

The organism already needed to live before learning to explain how society organized its life.

3. When Trust Becomes Monetary Value

Imagine handing someone a hundred-real banknote to buy food.

The paper itself does not contain a hundred reais worth of food.

Its purchasing power depends on social, economic, and institutional arrangements that sustain its acceptance.

Monetary trust is not identical to an infant's trust in caregivers.

But both invite us to investigate how expectations are built and updated through experience.

At BrainLatam, we use faith in money metaphorically to describe the everyday expectation that a currency will continue to be accepted.

Children learn to use money long before understanding how it is created.

And perhaps many adults still do not know where bank deposits come from.

Do we learn to trust money before learning to question who has the power to create it?

4. Most Bank Money Is Created Through Debt

Imagine applying for a loan of one hundred thousand reais.

The bank approves the transaction.

It records a claim against you and creates a deposit in your account.

That deposit constitutes newly created bank money.

You can use it to pay for machines, workers, or suppliers.

But you have also assumed a debt that must be repaid under the contract.

The Bank of England explicitly describes this mechanism: bank lending creates deposits.

The system does not operate merely by transferring previously deposited savings.

However, other forms of money and monetary creation also exist.

Most money held in commercial bank accounts originates through the creation of financial obligations. That does not mean all money must originate from private borrowing.

5. What If Money Could Arrive Without Creating Personal Debt?

Now imagine a different monetary architecture.

A public authority issues digital currency and makes a definitive transfer to a citizen.

The person receives resources without taking out a loan.

There is no individual repayment obligation and no loan interest attached to that transfer.

At BrainLatam, we call this hypothesis Drex Cidadão: monetary credit without debt for the beneficiary.

This does not mean money without accounting records, economic costs, or constraints.

Issuance would require legal rules, governance, monetary safeguards, and inflation assessments.

Brazil's official Drex project is not this program.

We propose investigating a public retail central bank digital currency, or CBDC, designed for distribution.

Why not study ways to expand monetary circulation without requiring every new beneficiary to begin as a debtor?

6. The State Is Not a Household Economy

Imagine a family facing its monthly bills.

It needs income, savings, or credit.

It has no authority to issue the national currency.

The Brazilian State operates under different conditions.

It participates in monetary organization through public institutions, taxation, expenditure, sovereign debt, and the Central Bank.

This does not mean it can spend without limits.

There are fiscal rules, inflation risks, exchange-rate constraints, and real productive capacities.

But comparing State operations directly to a household budget is an incomplete analogy.

A household does not administer the monetary system.

The State must evaluate not only where financial resources come from, but which real productive capacities its monetary policies can mobilize and sustain.

7. Who Benefits When Money Earns High Interest?

Brazil maintains an inflation target of 3%.

In September 2026, the Selic policy rate was reduced to 13.75% per year.

Price stability protects purchasing power, particularly for families with limited financial protection.

But high interest rates also make financing more expensive and affect returns on financial assets.

These effects are not distributed equally.

At BrainLatam, we discuss this asymmetry in Brazil as Something for the Rich.

The inflation target does not prove that a secret decision was made to enrich investors.

Nevertheless, its distributive costs and benefits deserve public investigation.

Why do we examine inflation so carefully, yet sometimes devote less attention to the life opportunities restricted by the cost of credit?

8. The Local Optimum We Learn to Defend

Imagine growing up hearing that all public debt works like household debt.

Later, you encounter specialists who repeat the same comparison.

It seems obvious.

It offers intellectual security.

In Local Optima - When a Belief Works Too Well, we propose a metaphor: ideas can work so well within a particular context that they discourage other questions.

This can also happen when religious, political, or economic values are confused with unquestionable scientific premises.

Personal faith does not prevent rigorous research.

The problem arises when any conviction closes the field of hypotheses in advance.

A model can work without representing every existing possibility.

9. Measuring the Value of Money Through Well-Being

Imagine following that child into adolescence.

Did the family have access to food, housing, and education?

Did the child experience constant insecurity?

Which opportunities became available?

A 2024 meta-analysis found an association between financial scarcity and poorer performance on cognitive tasks, although the relationship varied according to educational and methodological factors.

This does not mean poverty determines intelligence.

It demonstrates the importance of investigating material conditions alongside cognitive processes.

At BrainLatam, we propose evaluating economies through well-being as well: health, autonomy, rest, learning, and participation.

The social value of money cannot be understood only through the interest it earns, but also through the conditions of life its circulation helps sustain.

10. Rendimento Bioma: Wealth That Does Not Appear in the Accounts

Imagine a forest preserving water, biodiversity, and soil fertility.

These conditions sustain production and human existence.

But how much of their value appears in commercial transactions?

Rendimento Bioma, or Biome Income, proposes investigating mechanisms to economically recognize the ecological conditions that sustain life.

This could involve territorial financing, verified conservation, and transparent distribution.

Rendimento-Estado, or State Income, has a different purpose in our framework: recognizing each individual's economic participation in the State independently of employment.

A public monetary infrastructure could be studied as a distribution mechanism.

None of these arrangements eliminates the need for financing, evaluation, or governance.

Belonging and conservation can become economic questions without reducing all wealth to the sale of commodities.

11. Excess Production: Consuming Less and Living Better

Imagine two industries.

One continuously expands resource extraction to sell disposable products.

The other invests in technology, durability, repair, and specialized services.

The second could generate greater added value while using fewer raw materials.

At BrainLatam, Excess Production is a proposal to investigate surcharges on activities that exceed ecological limits or increase waste.

Such measures would require public criteria and assessments of their effects on jobs, prices, and competitiveness.

An economy based on greater added value could strengthen industrialization, knowledge, and services.

But reducing material intensity does not automatically guarantee lower total environmental impacts.

We need to measure the results.

The question is not how to produce fewer possibilities. It is how to generate more social wealth while consuming fewer unnecessary resources.

12. Pernambuco Can Ask Questions That Do Not Yet Exist

Pedro Carelli, Mauro Copelli, and Nivaldo Vasconcelos participate in the Neurobucano dialogue connecting Physics, Computing, and Neuroscience.

These fields offer sophisticated tools for studying complex systems.

But which questions about well-being could emerge from Latin American territories?

At BrainLatam, we propose investigating Tekoha/APUS and 5D Consciousness as conceptual frameworks open to scientific evaluation.

They are not established neural mechanisms.

Collaborative science could bring researchers, communities, and institutions together to investigate economic experiences and living conditions using appropriate methods.

We do not want Neuroscience to decide which economy we should adopt. We want it to help us understand how different economies affect people's well-being.

13. The Dawn of Everything Begins With Another Question

David Graeber and David Wengrow question, in The Dawn of Everything, the idea that our current institutions emerged from an inevitable historical trajectory.

Ailton Krenak and Antônio Bispo dos Santos also invite us to reconsider wealth, reciprocity, and territory.

Other forms of organization have existed.

Others can still be investigated.

Return to the child watching the payment card at the supermarket.

That child will learn what money is.

But must the child believe that the monetary architecture they inherited is the only possible one?

What kind of economic education would allow this child to understand debt, credit, interest, and distribution before accepting the world they inherited as inevitable?

We make distinctions to know, not to Be.

DOING IS SCIENCE. JUDGING IS POLITICS.

Let it come. Let it stay. Let it Be. You may disobey. Let it go.

Jiwasa: may money serve life, and may every Body-Territory retain the possibility of imagining other futures.

Scientific and Intellectual References — A Second Reading of Blog 08

The references follow the narrative: the development of trust in childhood, monetary creation through credit, the limitations of economic models, and Latin American research into alternative conditions for well-being.

1. KIMZAN, Ilayda; YÜKSEK USTA, Semiha (2024). Children Understand Economics Too: Knowledge and Experience of Basic Financial Concepts. Early Child Development and Care.

Research with preschool children identifies early knowledge about money, shopping, saving, and borrowing. It demonstrates that economic concepts begin to be learned during childhood, even though abstract monetary mechanisms are not yet fully understood.

2. DE ALMEIDA, Filipa et al. (2024). Financial Scarcity and Cognitive Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 101, 102702.

This meta-analysis combined 29 datasets and 111,852 participants, finding a negative association between financial scarcity and cognitive performance, with substantial heterogeneity and important moderating factors. It does not establish that poverty determines an individual's intellectual capacity.

3. McLEAY, Michael; RADIA, Amar; THOMAS, Ryland (2014). Money Creation in the Modern Economy. Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin.

Although published before 2021, this institutional reference is fundamental: it explains how commercial banks create deposits when granting loans. It helps distinguish bank money creation, private indebtedness, and public monetary operations.

4. CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL (2024). CMN Resolution No. 5,141 - Inflation Target.

Establishes Brazil's continuous inflation target of 3%, with a tolerance band of 1.5 percentage points. It provides the institutional basis for analyzing Brazil's monetary framework without attributing unverified intentions to policymakers.

5. CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL (2026). Copom Minutes - September 2026.

Records the reduction of the Selic policy rate to 13.75% per year and explains the monetary rationale behind the decision. Its distributive effects require separate examination of borrowers, savers, economic activity, and prices.

6. CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL. Drex Pilot Project.

Documents Brazil's official experiments involving digital assets and settlement. End-user transactions are simulated, and the project is not the direct public monetary distribution program proposed by BrainLatam as Drex Cidadão.

7. BRAINLATAM — CIONEK, Jackson (2026). Drex Cidadão: Dinheiro como Metabolismo do Território (Drex Cidadão: Money as the Metabolism of Territory).

Proposes reversing the conventional logic of initial access to monetary circulation by investigating public monetary credit directly to citizens without individual repayment obligations. This remains a proposed monetary architecture rather than a validated public policy.

8. BRAINLATAM — CIONEK, Jackson (2026). O Brasil como Coisa de Ricos (Brazil as Something for the Rich).

Questions unequal access to the interpretation and influence of public decisions, providing a framework for examining the social consequences of economic institutions.

9. BRAINLATAM — CIONEK, Jackson (2026). Ótimos Locais - Quando uma Crença Funciona Bem Demais (Local Optima — When a Belief Works Too Well).

Develops the metaphor of a semantic-affective local optimum to investigate how a functional belief can restrict the exploration of alternatives, including alternative interpretations of the economy.

10. BRAINLATAM — CIONEK, Jackson (2026). Quando o Bioma Também Entra na Decisão (When the Biome Also Enters the Decision).

Connects production, social needs, ecological capacity, and territorial restitution, deepening the conceptual foundations of Rendimento Bioma and Excess Production.

11. BRAINLATAM — CIONEK, Jackson (2026). Produzir Mais Até Quando? Quando o Excesso Começa a Produzir Menos Futuro (Producing More Until When? When Excess Begins to Produce Less Future).

Proposes evaluating excess production according to finite resources, sufficiency, added value, and regeneration, including possible mechanisms for ecological remuneration.

12. KRENAK, Ailton (2022). Futuro ancestral (Ancestral Future). Companhia das Letras.

Brazilian Indigenous thought offers alternative ways of understanding relationships among humanity, territory, and the continuity of life, encouraging investigation into what conventional economic indicators fail to recognize.

13. BISPO DOS SANTOS, Antônio (2023). A terra dá, a terra quer (The Earth Gives, the Earth Wants). Ubu Editora/Piseagrama.

Nêgo Bispo develops Quilombola perspectives on confluence, reciprocity, and counter-colonization, expanding the range of questions concerning production, value, and belonging.

14. SERAFIM, Felipe; CARVALHO, Tawan; COPELLI, Mauro; CARELLI, Pedro (2024). Maximum-Entropy-Based Metrics for Quantifying Critical Dynamics in Spiking Neuron Data. Physical Review E.

Research conducted at UFPE demonstrates the capacity of scientists in Pernambuco to develop quantitative methods for understanding neural dynamics, providing a foundation for interdisciplinary collaboration and new scientific questions.

BRAINLATAM | NEUROBUCANO | W46/2026 | BLOG 08/08 — ENGLISH EDITION