Embodied Sensory Experience Pit Sense

Embodied sensory experience provides the most direct warrant for judgments about risk. In the darkness of a mine, miners employ all of their senses to hear, see, feel, and smell hazards around them. Miners describe the ability to sense these physical phenomena as pit sense—an embodied sensory knowledge derived from site-specific practice in a particular working environment.Pit sense is physical and. sensory knowledge in the most literal of senses. It exists in the ability of the human body to feel changes in pressure and to hear differences in sounds. Thus, pops indicate the pre.ssure of methane bumps indicate yielding pillars. When timbers fail, miners hear cracks that warn them of a working rtx)f.  

For outside observers, pit sense may seem to belong to the realm of folklore or old wives tales that combine a grain of scientific truth with highly selective storytelling. But engineers and scientists also share an embtxlied understanding of risk. At a recent visit to one of the most advanced British mines. 

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