I'll provide you with a psychological explanation!
Assuming your nana does not have any common neurodegenerative diseases in the elderly such as dementia, more so alzheimer's disease (i'm sure she doesn't), then she could possibly suffer what is most known as "Old age memory decline"
Basically with age, memory can start to deteriorate due to 4 reasons:
1) Cognitive slowing - slowing down of neural processes in the nervous system, which can impair performance on certain tasks.
- She could also have shrinking in the frontal lobes of the brain which can occur with age, this part of the brain is involved with maintaining attention, and if there is difficulty in attention, memory is most likely not stored.
2) lack of confidence - if she fears she may not remember something, she won't
3) Lack of motivation - most elderly people think its not necessary to remember things that they don't need to remember, however research evidence shows that if it's really important (such as taking medication), their memory is fine
4) Measure of retention used - the ability to recall information freely also is reduced with age, so it may be hard for her to retrieve things.
What this can result in is that your nana has trouble storing memories.
Now, there are many different types of memories, they can be categorized into:
1-Procedural (actions and skills like riding a bike),
2-Semantic (facts, info about the world, and
3-Episodic (memories of personal experiences, like first day of school)
With natural aging, Episodic memories are the most likely to go away, this is why elderly, like your nana, may have trouble remembering what she had for breakfast or anything of that nature, it is also why elderly talk more about their childhood then what happened in their mid-years.
However, for the memory of "putting songs onto ipod", this is more so a procedural/semantic memory.
With age, Procedural/Semantic memories are generally not affected, HOWEVER, the encoding (storing of information), declines because they aren't as efficient as storing their memories as they were when they were younger.
- Speed and fluency of retrieval is also affected, because if it is encoded into memory poorly, it will be remembered poorly.
Thus, it is likely that your nana has trouble encoding how to put songs on her ipod efficiently, and it is why she cannot retrieve that memory of how to do it.
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Why you can't make your bed
- This is most definitely a procedural memory - How to make your bed is an action or skill, it is very hard to describe "how to" make your bed in words.
All I can say is that you may have a lack of motivation or lack of attention when learning how to make the bed.
You're not efficiently paying enough attention to encode the memory of how to make your bed into your brain.
However, it is very hard to learn procedural's because you cannot learn them from "words", it is all learning by observation, you must try mimic what is going on because it is hard to verbally describe "how to ride a bike", or "how to skate", the best way to learn this is just by watching and copying.
I could go on more about memory, what happens in the brain and other reasons, but you get the jist of it, nana has a more scientific explanation of why, you on the other hand.... need the motivation to learn!
