'Brain fitness' market booming with Boomers

NEW YORK -- Chester Santos has been training his brain for seven years.

At 32, he's not worried about losing his memory. He's taking advantage of a growing market in "brain fitness" spurred by aging baby boomers.

Teenagers cramming for tests and people worried about "senior moments" can now turn to an explosion of brain-assisting video games, such as Nintendo's Brain Age; puzzles that are said to ward off dementia, such as Sudoku and crosswords; and online tips that claim to train the brain.

Santos, the 2008 USA Memory Championship winner, can memorize a shuffled deck of cards in three minutes and learn 100 random words and 100 new names and faces in 15.

"People are capable of doing so much more with their brains than they think is possible," says Santos, who recently quit his software job to teach his memory techniques full-time.

The brain fitness boom might seem counterintuitive in an age when technology has eased memory stress: cellphones store numbers, GPS systems give directions, websites store passwords and e-mail programs automatically recall used addresses.

Still, the brain fitness software market reached $225 million in revenues in 2007, according to a SharpBrains report published earlier this year, up from an estimated $100 million in 2005. The increase was driven only in part by Nintendo's popular Brain Age game, says Alvaro Fernandez, CEO & Co-Founder of SharpBrains, a market-research firm.

"This is not just a Nintendo-fueled fad," he says. "The brain fitness market passed a tipping point in 2007 thanks to the convergence of a very proactive boomer generation hitting their 60s."

Many boomers have watched their parents struggle with Alzheimers, and an estimated 10 million of them are now expected to develop the disease, according to a recent report from the Alzheimer's Association.

"People are worried," says Dr. John Hart Jr., medical science director of the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas. "You have a large group of the population getting to the age where they are sort of vulnerable to degenerative neurological diseases that seem to be prevalent."