Article Title: Animals do have memories, and can help us crack Alzheimer’s

Article Summary

The article at hand makes the point for once and for all that animals outside humans have the virtue of memory too, and explains that this finding may help humans battle Alzheimer’s. The author starts by saying that humans have struggled to accept that other species can have the memory function too, for many years. They have grappled with coming to terms with it, and even famous intellects like Rene Descartes have argued against the idea of animals with memory. However, with small progress in our knowledge about the workings of the animal mind, like us finally discovering that animals have at least some degree of motor memory, more people have come closer to accepting that animals may have memories after all. That they do was proven in rather a groundbreaking manner in an experiment where rats were incentivized to follow certain odors and directions for material rewards. The rats performed very well, establishing that animals do remember. Now, scientists have been encouraged to perform experiments on rats because they can remember, and because in Alzheimer’s, the memory function is the most affected. Using data obtained from rats in clinics, a drug could be developed to administer to Alzheimer’s patients to arrest their mental degeneration, the kind of drug hardly ever effective today. The scientists are determined to stop at nothing less than high success rates in the drugs – finally, a tactic to beat the feared disease may have been found.