LETTERS TO THE EDITOR President Sara Pearson’s final message in
the Oct-Nov-Dec 2025 issue of Professional Geologist about Geo-ACTS struck a chord with me, but not what might be expected. As an 85-year-old geologist caring for his wife of 63 years with dementia for the past several years, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about this horrible condition that is affecting so many people today. Something I learned recently about dementia really stood out to me in reading President Pearson’s message as it concerns the way people are liable to perceive things.
A group in the UK called Contented
Dementia Trust uses a process they call the SPECIAL method which describes memory as a photo album. Each day is a page in the album with each photo on the page a specific memory from that day. Each photo is a combination of facts and feelings about the memory. Recalling memories is basically sorting our memory photo album and as we grow older we tend to turn the pages more slowly trying to recover some memory. Dementia introduces a new type of photo in which facts of the memory are not stored but the feelings are, leaving fact- free and feeling-only photos. As dementia progresses, more and more feeling-only photos are stored in memory which even- tually makes feelings more important than facts. Keeping feelings foremost in dealing the dementia patients is very important. This photo album approach has helped me better appreciate what my wife is going through and gives me a broader perspective of how people react to things. It emphasizes the importance of feelings with memory. I think that we all let feelings take on more importance than facts at times.
President Sara Pearson’s description of the people in Iceland going toward an erupt- ing volcano rather than sensibly retreating suggests to me that their feeling of excite- ment of seeing something exciting and different overpowered the fact that they were putting themselves in danger. I think that feelings versus facts have so much to do with the problem of science communication today. People are storing memory photos of false “facts” with positive feelings and conversely, scientific facts with negative feelings. Misinformation seems to thrive on creating negative feelings while facts, by themselves, either create no feelings, or negative feelings, in the general public. I think somehow, we need to be able to use our scientific facts to create positive feelings about those facts. If we fail to consider the feeling aspect of our facts, we may never regain public trust. Exactly how we would do that, I don’t know at this time, but I think it is something to keep in mind when we are presenting things to the public.
Sincerely, W. William (Bill) Boberg, CPG-06313
4 TPG •
Jan.Feb.Mar 2026
www.aipg.org
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