The aging population is used to being bombarded with reports about increased risks to their physical health. News alerts on heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are so common as to lose their initial impact after a while. But the latest health scare is probably the most terrifying, as it assaults us where we used to laugh—at what we perceive as our perfectly normal “senior moments.”

When is a senior moment not a senior moment at all, but indicative of an increased risk of Alzheimer’s? That is, indeed, the question. We already know that by age 85, every man and woman has a 50% chance of falling victim to the memory-robbing condition that eventually robs their lives.

What is the primary mantra of a successful entrepreneur? Find a void and try to fill it. And that is exactly the void that is now being filled by many such individuals who see a huge market emerging in memory-enhancing programs, not the least of which, of course, is basic exercise and crossword puzzles.

According to a www.telegram.com article on brain fitness by Megan K. Scott of The Associated Press, “people are capable of doing so much more with their brains than they think is possible.” This is a direct quote by 32-year old Chester Santos, the 2008 USA Memory Championship winner, who is capable of memorizing a shuffled deck of cards in three minutes and learning 100 random words and 100 new names and faces in fifteen.

Brain fitness is on its way to becoming a booming industry, as it gives boomers and beyond a perceived solution to counter their concern for a diminishing memory bank. Even in this age of computers, it is far more healthy for your own memory to do the work than to leave it for the gigibytes on your hard drive.

In 2007, the brain fitness software market reached $225 million in revenues, according to a report in SharpBrains, up from an estimated $100 million in 2005. At the forefront of this software market is Nintendo’s popular Brain Age game, but many more options are now just a click away, and more coming on board as you read this.