Realizing your tacit knowledge

How do you realize you know things that others around you don’t? I’ll explain what I mean.

First, I’m not writing this to say that I am extraordinary compared to others. We are all extraordinary in unique ways. I’m writing about realizing your tacit knowledge because sometimes we (as in all of us humans) are not aware of all the information we have stored in our brains. This is especially relevant to me now because I’m nearly done with my PhD. That means I have to transfer as much of this information to my labmates before moving onto my next position.

To be honest, I only recently realized that I possessed skills and knowledge that others think are special. I just figured everyone around me (current colleagues) would just keep on doing what they do, and that I didn’t play a role large enough to affect operations. This recent “wake up call” so to speak was delivered by my PhD supervisor. He’s the one that initiated my self reflection, and provided the motivation for me to really assess the skills, knowledge, and experiences that I probably take for granted.

For example, since I work in the field of neuropsychology (understanding the relationship between brain and behavior), I often end up wearing many hats, many in a single day. On a given day I may start off as an academic, reading research articles I find interesting. Then, a few hours later I will probably end up wearing my software developer hat in order to write software to solve my own problems, or to help others solve theirs. Later still, in the same day I may also work as a neuroimager or MRI tech if I’m at the hospital scanning research participants. On other days, I may even throw in some teaching or training when asked to do so.

All of those jobs mentioned above can easily be someone’s entire career. Admittedly, I am probably not as skilled at each of those jobs as someone who has chosen one of them as their sole career. They will obviously have more experience since they have been doing that one thing day in and day out. However, I’m not necessarily disadvantaged by wearing many hats, and bouncing around from task to task on a daily basis. In fact, some may even view the ability (or freedom) to task switch so often as a major benefit.

Keep in mind that I don’t work this way because I have to. I work this way because I want to, so that I can fulfill my need to feel successful. And in fact, I do feel successful on most days because wearing so many hats, and knowing how to do so many different jobs allows me to integrate all that information across skill domains.

What I mean by this is that I can often directly see how the actions in one task will affect another. For example, when collecting MRI data I can make conscious decisions about how the protocol is designed, and how the data is organized that directly affect how I will write software to analyze that data in a more efficient way. Along the same lines, while writing software to analyze MRI data I can discover inefficiencies and directly impact policy so that MRI collection can be modified. Furthermore, I can rapidly integrate the information I read (while wearing my academic hat) such that I can make useful software, and collect meaningful/novel MRI data.

Overall, I would say that perhaps I am just very experienced at doing many related, yet separate tasks, and being able to integrate information across many (seemingly separate) domains. I’m not unique in this experience. I just have my own special combination of knowledge and personal “try/fail” attempts. We all contain knowledge that is just simply “there”, and it may be difficult to precisely put in words how to perform a certain skill, since doing it the way you do it might rely on many other bits of information from other domains.

This entire blog is a way that I can attempt to put in words (and pictures) my unique combination of knowledge and experiences so that others may view the world as I do. Hopefully it will also help some people out there learn a new skill or two. Remember that we all have knowledge that we effortlessly tap into. Others can sometimes see this as extraordinary, but that’s just because they haven’t live what you’ve lived, and vice versa.