The 21st Century Brain: Cutting-Edge Neuroscience to Help Us Navigate the Future Author: Dr Hannah Critchlow ISBN-13: 978-1911709961Publisher: Torva Guideline Price: £22Dr Hannah Critchlow’s survey of 21st-century neuroscience asks her readers an uncomfortable question: is the digital age turning your brain into mush? We all carry an “infinitely sophisticated” circuit board inside our heads, the Cambridge academic notes, 1.5kg of soft flesh encasing 86 billion nerve cells that process information at up to 193km/h (120mp/h). Having outsourced so much of our cognitive labour to technology, however, it’s frighteningly easy to grow mentally flabby and waste this precious organ on scrolling through slop.Happily, Critchlow enthuses, you don’t need to settle for an inner life stuck at the shallow end. Perhaps her field’s greatest discovery of recent years is how often the genes we inherit are trumped by cultural and environmental influences. To put it another way, even the less gifted can train their noodles and become more like dynamic bees in a hive than army ants in a death spiral.Critchlow’s study draws extensively from international research, often beginning paragraphs with some variation of: “An exciting new laboratory trial in Japan shows …” She focuses on how to develop qualities that machines cannot automate: empathy, creativity and accepting the uncertainty John Keats called “negative capability”. What we need above all in 2026 is “cathedral thinking”, she argues, swapping instant gratification for the collective long-term planning that built Europe’s giant Gothic churches.All this is backed up by cold, hard data littered with terms such as “synaptic plasticity”, “enzyme telomerase” and “mitochondrial bioenergetics”. By contrast, Critchlow’s practical tips at the end of each section are disappointingly mundane, boiling down to: exercise regularly, sleep soundly, eat less processed food, build social networks, allow time for daydreaming and keep trying new things. While the technical reasons are convincingly explained, they feel like basic common sense applicable to any moment in history.Still, Critchlow closes strongly with an erudite chapter on artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts homo sapiens’ brainpower will carry on evolving to make this “cyber overlord in waiting” our servant instead. Already, she concludes, AI’s contribution to helping us find antibiotics for rare diseases suggests “we may all be standing on the cusp of a leap forward in human intelligence.” While her book is a little heavy on abstract concepts and light on illustrative stories, reading it should certainly do your own grey matter no harm at all.