Your brain is wired to conduct your most important work each day through the most intricate connections and across your brain’s four major lobes: frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital. But how you conquer the complexities you do relies on going full frontal.

To achieve all that you do—to think, to plan, to reason, to manage your emotions, to make decisions, and to problem solve—is a major feat of your frontal lobe. High-level thinking skills that you so often take for granted—such as determining what home to buy, what job to pursue, what medical advice to take and what investment to make—stem from the brainpower of your frontal lobe.

As the central command center of your brain, your frontal lobe links information back and forth across other brain regions and has the vastest neural network and the most reciprocal interconnections with other brain structures.

New brain science reveals that the road to thinking smarter appears to lead to your brain’s intricate frontal lobe networks. However, your frontal lobe does not work in isolation; your brain regions work in concert from the cellular level to entire brain networks to achieve amazing feats each day.

The high capacity of your frontal lobe hardware and the rich opportunities to rewire its software through complex thinking set you and all humans far above all other life forms.

Your frontal lobe represents nearly a third of your entire brain and is the last region of the brain to develop and the first to decline with age. From early to young adulthood, the frontal lobes, and the intricate connections between them, are undergoing dramatic functional and structural changes that remodel the brain’s complex connectivity and advance its capacity to engage in integrated, reasoned, and high-level thinking. Sadly, brain science has shown that frontal lobe function begins to decline in our mid-40s.

How does it feel to perhaps only have two decades of prime brain health? What a depressing thought! The good news is that occurs because we let it; it does not have to be a fait accompli and predetermined destiny. You can strengthen the brainpower of your frontal lobe every day of your life.

Here are a few tips to maximize your frontal lobe function: