CONCEPT
Sedimented Experience
Merleau-Ponty's term, adopted by Thompson, for the accumulated history of embodied engagement that deposits in the body as dispositions orienting perception and action without requiring conscious deliberation.
Sedimented experience names the mechanism through which expertise accumulates in the embodied organism. The experienced programmer's sense that a codebase is fragile, the surgeon's sense that a tissue plane is not where it should be, the editor's sense that a sentence is wrong before she can articulate the rule it violates — each is drawing on sediment: the accumulated residue of thousands of hours of structural coupling with the domain, deposited in the body as a set of dispositions that orient perception and action pre-reflectively. The felt sense is not a hunch or an irrational impulse. It is the organism's deepest form of cognition, refined through repeated engagement, and constitutive of the skilled practice that distinguishes the expert from the novice.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept is Merleau-Ponty's, from Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and Thompson adopts it as the mechanism through which affective framing is constructed. The expert's affective response to a situation is not arbitrary — it is shaped by her sedimented