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 ageing 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 memorise 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 counter-intuitive in an age when technology has eased memory stress: cellphones store numbers, GPS systems give directions, websites store passwords and email 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 and co-founder of SharpBrains, a market-research firm.
"This is not just a Nintendo-fuelled 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 report from the Alzheimer's Association.
"People are worried," says Dr John Hart Jr, medical science director of the Centre 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 prevalent."
Hart says there is "reasonable evidence" that challenging your brain by learning new things can stave off the cognitive decline that comes with ageing.
But brain fitness programmes differ from traditional learning by focusing on drills for specific cognitive abilities, such as concentration and retaining information.
Hart says there is no one brain "exercise" guaranteed to work for everyone.
That hasn't stopped brain fitness programmes from making claims. Posit Science says its computer-based programs will "help you think faster, focus better and remember more."