Aging Brains Get a Boost From Strenuous Workouts

First, I take a good look at the wooden child's puzzle, whose pieces form a colorful umbrella. Then, I blindfold myself, dump the puzzle out on the table and put it back together again.

"Very good. You did it in under a minute," says Reenaa Chawla, director of The Brain Studio in Upper Saddle River, NJ.

The next challenge, sans blindfold, does not go as well. After a couple of minutes of nervously attempting to put together an imageless jigsaw puzzle with wooden pieces of varying shapes, I give up. The same thing happens on the third challenge -- a maze -- though I take that home with me and successfully finish it later.

Clearly, my brain could be a bit more, well, fit.

And that's where "trainers" like Chawla come in.

Over the past few years, brain fitness has become a very hot topic -- and, thanks to aging baby boomers, a thriving industry.

Type "brain fitness" into Google and you'll get more than a million entries. Do the same on amazon.com, and you'll have a choice of more than 2,000 books, a few dozen software programs (including Nintendo's "Brain Age" games) and eight DVDs. That last category includes PBS' fascinating "The Brain Fitness Program," narrated by Peter Coyote. (Perhaps you saw it?) It described the brain's ability to change and adapt, even rewire itself ("brain plasticity" is the brain's ability to rearrange the connections between its neurons), as well as the computer-based stimuli that a team of University of California scientists have developed to "drive beneficial chemical, physical and functional changes in the brain."

The market for brain-stimulation products in the U.S. more than doubled between 2005 and 2007, to $225 million, according to a recent report by SharpBrains, a market research firm. It projects that figure will exceed $2 billion by 2015.