Ask anyone who's ever forgotten the name of a longtime co-worker, re-read a paragraph four times before absorbing its content, or hit the brakes too slowly to avert a fender-bender: When the mental strength and agility of youth start to slip, the wisdom of age tells you something.
You want it back.
If a method of preserving or restoring that youthful mental vigor were safe, inexpensive and as simple and diverting as playing a video game for a short while each day, wisdom would also tell you to do it.
That calculation is why mental fitness programs have become the latest frontier in the nation's quest to age without conceding to infirmity.
The programs vary widely in format and cost, including online programs that cost $10 per month, hand-held games that can cost $140 and software packages priced at about $400. Special touch-screen consoles designed for a community's use or specialized programs for people with conditions such as attention deficit can cost several thousand dollars.
In the last three years, these brainpower-boosting programs have proliferated, with names like MindFit, Happy Neuron, Brain Fitness and Lumosity. Americans this year are expected to invest $225 million in these programs -- up from just $70 million in 2003 -- in an effort to tune up the brain, strengthen the memory and forestall or reverse the cognitive slippage that often comes with age, psychiatric disease, stroke or medical treatments.
But when an industry springs up so quickly, and makes claims so sweeping and seductive, the wisdom and experience of age should tell you one more thing: Ask for evidence and expect hype.
"There is plausibility, both biological and behavioral, to the claim that these may work," says Molly Wagster, chief of the National Institute on Aging's neuropsychology branch. "But it is still a situation of 'buyer beware.' "
Insurance companies such as Humana and Penn Treaty American Corp. have begun to distribute software programs such as Posit Science's Brain Fitness 2.0 to millions of their older customers. In two years on the market, Nintendo's Brain Age, a video game designed to be played on a hand-held game device, has sold 10 million copies worldwide. Retirement communities are rushing to establish brain gyms to help current residents sharpen their mental skills and to attract baby boomers, who may one day put such amenities on a par with a weight room and a track.
