“[W]e can know more than we can tell”: tacit knowledge and narrative

Over the last few decades, cognitive sciences have described how the plasticity of the human brain adapts and responses to diverse and constant challenges. It has become increasingly clear that this ability to adapt reveals and sustains a process in which human cognition does not function like a machine. On the contrary, the human mind is characterized by the so-called 4E-Cognition, a cognition that is necessarily embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. To understand how human beings think, it's not enough to look at the brain. It is necessary to recognize the relational and cultural dimension that provides the brain with the vital environment in which it functions and with the tacit knowledge to operate in it. Without the body in which it proceeds, without the context in which it is situated, without the action that calls it, the brain is simply empty and in vain - and without the tacit knowledge deriving from this relational and cultural dimension it hardly comes to terms with the challenges ahead. Tacit knowledge includes cultural models, schemas, concepts, ways of worldmaking, ways of saying – as if they were part of one’s nature. Culture is therefore the first condition of the human, the condition and motive of a being that - like all others - is shaped by the world in which it lives, and that shapes the world like no other. The brain is the organ where biological nature and human culture stimulate each other. "we can know more than we can tell" - this famous definition of the human mind by Michael Polanyi is a starting point to understand the relation between tacit knowledge and narrative.