With the nation’s 78 million baby boomers approaching the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys?” moments, it’s no wonder the market for computer-based brain training has shot up from essentially zero in 2005 to $80 million this year, according to the consulting firm SharpBrains.

But while the puzzles, math questions, reading exercises and other challenges in, say, Nintendo’s Brain Age are billed as just entertainment, other brain software claims to do more. And it does: if you practice eye-hand coordination, do memory exercises and sharpen your problem-solving acumen, you get better at them (at least in the immediate aftermath of training), as the MindFit brain-exercise software from Israel’s CogniFit Ltd. has been found to do after people used it for three months.

Now comes the largest and most rigorous study of a commercially-available training program, and it shows that there is hope for aging brains. This morning, at the meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, scientists are presenting data showing that after eight weeks of daily one-hour sessions with Brain Fitness 2.0 from Posit Science, elderly volunteers got measurably better in their brain’s speed and accuracy of processing. And unlike every other training program tested before, the improvements "generalize to broad measures of cognition and are noticeable in everyday life," Elizabeth Zelinski of the University of Southern California, who led the IMPACT (Improvement in Memory with Plasticity-based Adaptive Cognitive Training) Study, reports.