Cogito ergo sum.

René Descartes

The human brain is remarkable for its ability to adapt and evolve. The way we use our mental acuity to handle situations, stresses and sensory experiences that are unfamiliar to us is extraordinary.

The more we unravel the brain's secrets, the more we can marvel at its complexity and beauty.

Heading towards our future, it is reassuring to know we are in safe intellectual hands. We can rest assured our brain will maintain its phenomenal ability to evolve and adapt to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.

Developing high-performance thinking is not hard, but it does require us to look after our brain in the right way. This involves conscious choice. Conscious choice in turn involves best thought practice. Best thought practice — that depends on having a healthy, fit brain.

If we are really serious about resolving the social challenges we currently face, such as rising levels of obesity, poor physical health, poor mental health and dementia, we need to stop and ask ourselves the hard questions. This is the first stage of welcoming your future brain.

To get the most out of our lives, to perform at our best, means starting from a foundational level. Creating a brain that is fit, healthy and optimised to work well begins with our choice of lifestyle.

It's not that we don't know what to do. Our brain knows what it needs. It got us this far, after all. We are already ahead on the evolutionary track (sorry dinosaurs).

What we have to do is think — and choose. Think to consciously implement those healthy choices that will make the biggest differences to our brain's performance. Choose to make our brain as healthy and fit as it can be.

Being busy is no excuse. We are all busy. But often, it seems, we fall back on the excuse of being too busy rather than taking responsibility and being accountable for our own health and wellbeing.

In 2011 Barnes and Yaffe found that the number of people projected to develop Alzheimer's disease by 2050 could be halved if the top seven potentially modifiable risk factors were addressed. (This was based on the assumption of a causal link between each risk factor and Alzheimer's.)

Surely reducing our risk for cognitive decline has to be a no-brainer. (Yes, I groaned at that one too, sorry. Doctors may be intelligent, but we aren't necessarily good at being punny.)

The top seven risk factors are:

• low levels of education
• smoking
• inadequate physical activity
• depression
• midlife hypertension
• type 2 diabetes
• obesity.

As life expectancy increases, we expect to live longer with our physical and mental faculties intact. Undertaking activities to help achieve this quality of life is paramount.

An increasing proportion of people are now choosing to stay in the workplace beyond retirement age either because they enjoy their work and feel capable of continuing, or out of economic necessity. The retirement age is itself rising, which means more of us working into our eighth decade.

All these factors mean there will also be an increasing number of people diagnosed with some form of cognitive deficit who will need assistance to stay in the workplace for as long as possible.

Is your workplace geared up for this?

How we apply ourselves to our work on a daily basis is the second aspect of high-performance thinking and the future brain. Again, we are back to choices and best thought practice.

How do you schedule your day so as to focus on what matters when it matters? How do you remember what is relevant? How do you ensure you have the cognitive energy to solve problems and make the most appropriate decisions easily and quickly?

Factoring in those choices helps us to remain calm under pressure and maintain our energy; it motivates us to do our work and do it well.

The third aspect of high-performance thinking is to remind ourselves that whatever we do, and however we do it, it will in some way involve others. It's about being — and staying — human. Whether we are looking to become more creative, more collaborative or more influential as a leader, it's about developing and integrating our emotional and social intelligence.

Anthony Howard, author of Humanise: Why Human-Centred Leadership Is the Key to the 21st Century, believes we are facing a crisis in leadership and calls for a review of how we become the best we can be by re-examining our own moral compass and building a strong empathy for others.

Whatever foundation you choose to operate from, it will always include developing strong relationships. If you want to understand what is going on in someone else's head, you have to start with a greater awareness of self. If we are tuned in to what really motivates or drives us, it becomes easier to understand what motivates others and to see their perspective.

The 12 keys of Future Brain provide an overview of what is possible. It's not a perfect or infallible system. We are not perfect beings. It's a framework that you can incorporate as an individual — as a human — when designing your own unique high-performance brain.

And, as someone with a high-performance brain who makes conscious choices and thinks with clarity, you will know that what serves you well today will need to be upgraded again tomorrow. Future Brain 1.0 will rapidly become FB 1.05. And that's the way it should be.

The impact of our technology — the human–computer interface — has not been addressed here. How do our genes, our environment and our technology interact to shape our thinking? That's the question to be addressed in the next book …

Meanwhile I leave you with three questions and a thought, which is as it should be. First, the questions:

What do you need to start doing now to create a fitter, healthier brain?

What needs to change to allow you to operate at your personal best?

What will you do differently to introduce more meaning into your work and your relationships and increase your level of happiness and wellbeing?

As for that thought: René Descartes' famous quote with which this section began is usually translated as ‘I think, therefore I am’, but a more correct and useful rendering is:

I am thinking, therefore I exist.

With a future brain, we can say:

I am high-performance thinking, therefore I excel.

Start excelling.