A neuroscientist's guide to future-proofing your brain and thinking smarter in the 21st Century

In her new book, The 21st Century Brain, scientist Hannah Critchlow explores the overlooked skills that will be necessary to flourish in the age of AI – and how we can cultivate them.

With the world around us evolving at an ever-greater pace, you may fantasise about upgrading your brain to make sense of it all. 

 At face value, this would seem impossible: our grey-and-white matter has largely the same structure as that of our ancestors living in the Stone Age. If anything, our brains are a bit smaller: archaeological remains suggest they have significantly shrunk in the past 10,000 years. 

Hannah Critchlow, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, offers many reasons to be optimistic, however. In her new book The 21st Century Brain she describes how we can all cultivate the mental flexibility that will be necessary to navigate the challenges ahead. 

"I basically wrote it for myself, so that I can make better decisions and improve my own life, especially as I go through middle age," she tells me. "But also for my parents, so that they can maintain a healthy brain into older age, and for my son, who's 10 now. What can I do to help his brain to flourish?" 

Read on to discover her secrets for future-proofing your mind. 

What inspired you to explore the concept of the 21st Century Brain?  

I first began working on the book three years ago, and in the intervening time, there's been an explosion of developments in AI. But it was obvious, even then, that this technology was going to start encroaching on all our lives, on a society-wide level, but also on an individual level – and then, as now, there was a lot of excitement about that, and a lot of fear.  

I wanted to take a step back, and acknowledge the fact that AI was developed from knowledge that we've got from neuroscience. So what if we flip that around and ask how we can use this understanding to make the most of the intelligence that we have within our own organic brain? The same understanding that has driven these technological developments can unleash the human cognitive potential that we all have.

What were your criteria for selecting the skills that will be most important for the 21st Century?  

I wanted to focus on the skills that have often been overlooked by scientists, but which underpin our ability to connect with each other, to imagine a new world, to innovate, to problem-solve, and to think longer term. Since we're living at a time of unprecedented change social and technological change, I examine our ability to tolerate change, uncertainty and ambiguity.  

All of this basically requires healthy "bioenergetics", so I also look at the mitochondria – the power stations of our cells. 

Let's start with emotional intelligence and empathy, which are often viewed as "soft skills". 

Emotional intelligence and empathy scores can be the biggest predictor of how satisfied we are with life, how positive we feel about our relations with others and academic success.  

When we look at the genetic data, it seems to have a heritability of between 10% and 45%, but we can all train our emotional intelligence and........

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