Awareness

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Awareness is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be of eve
nts. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being conscious of something.

Contents [hide]
1 Concept
2 Self-awareness
3 Neuroscience 3.1 Basic awareness
3.2 Basic interests
3.3 Changes in awareness
4 Living systems view
5 Communications and information systems
6 Covert awareness
7 Other uses
8 See also
9 References
10 External links
Concept[edit]
Awareness is a relative concept. Awareness may be focused on an internal state,
such as a visceral feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception.
Awareness provides the raw material from which animals develop qualia, or subjec
tive ideas about their experience. Insects have awareness that you are trying to
swat them or chase after them. But insects do not have consciousness in the usu
al sense, because they lack the brain capacity for thought and understanding.
Self-awareness[edit]
Main article: Self-awareness
Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes a condition o
f being aware of one's awareness or, self-awareness.[1] Efforts to describe cons
ciousness in neurological terms have focused on describing networks in the brain
that develop awareness of the qualia developed by other networks.[2]
Neuroscience[edit]
Neural systems that regulate attention serve to attenuate awareness among comple
x animals whose central and peripheral nervous system provides more information

than cognitive areas of the brain can assimilate. Within an attenuated system of
awareness, a mind might be aware of much more than is being contemplated in a f
ocused extended consciousness.
Basic awareness[edit]
Basic awareness of one's internal and external world depends on the brain stem.
Bjorn Merker,[3] an independent neuroscientist in Stockholm, Sweden, argues that
the brain stem supports an elementary form of conscious thought in infants with
hydranencephaly. "Higher" forms of awareness including self-awareness require c
ortical contributions, but "primary consciousness" or "basic awareness" as an ab
ility to integrate sensations from the environment with one's immediate goals an
d feelings in order to guide behavior, springs from the brain stem which human b
eings share with most of the vertebrates. Psychologist Carroll Izard emphasizes
that this form of primary consciousness consists of the capacity to generate emo
tions and an awareness of one's surroundings, but not an ability to talk about w
hat one has experienced. In the same way, people can become conscious of a feeli
ng that they can't label or describe, a phenomenon that's especially common in p
re-verbal infants.
Due to this discovery medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical a
ctivity face a serious challenge.[citation needed]
Basic interests[edit]
Down the brain stem lie interconnected regions that regulate the direction of ey
e gaze and organize decisions about what to do next, such as reaching for a piec
e of food or pursuing a potential mate.[citation needed]
Changes in awareness[edit]
The ability to consciously detect an image when presented at near-threshold stim
ulus varies across presentations. One factor is "baseline shifts" due to top dow
n attention that modulates ongoing brain activity in sensory cortex areas that a
ffects the neural processing of subsequent perceptual judgments.[4] Such top dow
n biasing can occur through two distinct processes: an attention driven baseline
shift in the alpha waves, and a decision bias reflected in gamma waves.[5]
Living systems view[edit]
Outside of neuroscience biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela contr
ibuted their Santiago theory of cognition in which they wrote:
Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of co
gnition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous sy
stem.[6]
This theory contributes a perspective that cognition is a process present at org
anic levels that we don't usually consider to be aware. Given the possible relat
ionship between awareness and cognition, and consciousness, this theory contribu
tes an interesting perspective in the philosophical and scientific dialogue of a
wareness and living systems theory.
Communications and information systems[edit]
In cooperative settings, awareness is a term used to denote knowledge created thr
ough the interaction of an agent and its environment in simple terms knowing what
is going on .[7] In this setting, awareness is meant to convey how individuals mon
itor and perceive the information surrounding their colleagues and the environme

nt they are in. This information is incredibly useful and critical to the perfor
mance and success of collaborations.[8][9] Awareness can be further defined by b
reaking it down into a set of characteristics:[10]
It is knowledge about the state of some environment
Environments are continually changing, therefore awareness knowledge must be con
stantly maintained
Individuals interact with the environment, and maintenance of awareness is accom
plished through this interaction.
It is generally part of some other activity
generally making it a secondary goal
to the primary goal of the activity.
Different categories of awareness have been suggested based on the type of infor
mation being obtained or maintained:[11]
Informal awareness is the sense of who s around and what are they up to. E.g. Info
rmation you might know from being collocated with an individual
Social awareness is the information you maintain about a social or conversationa
l context. This is a subtle awareness maintained through non-verbal cues, such a
s eye contact, facial express, etc.
Group-structural awareness is the knowledge of others roles, responsibilities, s
tatus in a group. It is an understanding of group dynamics and the relationship
another individual has to the group.
Workspace awareness this is a focus on the workspace s influence and mediation of
awareness information, particularly the location, activity, and changes of eleme
nts within the workspace.
These categories are not mutually exclusive, as there can be significant overlap
in what a particular type of awareness might be considered. Rather, these categ
ories serve to help understand what knowledge might be conveyed by a particular
type of awareness or how that knowledge might be conveyed. Workspace awareness i
s of particular interest to the CSCW community, due to the transition of workspa
ces from physical to virtual environments.
While the type of awareness above refers to knowledge a person might need in a p
articular situation, context awareness and location awareness refer to informati
on a computer system might need in a particular situation. These concepts of lar
ge importance especially for AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) app
lications.
The term of location awareness still is gaining momentum with the growth of ubiq
uitous computing. First defined with networked work positions (network location
awareness), it has been extended to mobile phones and other mobile communicable
entities. The term covers a common interest in whereabouts of remote entities, e
specially individuals and their cohesion in operation. The term of context aware
ness is a superset including the concept of location awareness. It extends the a
wareness to context features of an operational target as well as to context of a
n operational area.
Covert awareness[edit]
See also: Blindsight
Covert awareness is the knowledge of something without knowing it. Some patients
with specific brain damage are for example unable to tell if a pencil is horizo
ntal or vertical.[citation needed] They are however able to grab the pencil, usi
ng the correct orientation of the hand and wrist. This condition implies that so
me of the knowledge the mind possesses is delivered through alternate channels t
han conscious intent.[original research?]
Other uses[edit]

Awareness forms a basic concept of the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy.
In general, "awareness" may also refer to public or common knowledge or understa
nding about a social, scientific, or political issue, and hence many movements t
ry to foster "awareness" of a given subject, that is, "raising awareness". Examp
les include AIDS awareness and Multicultural awareness.
Awareness may refer to anesthesia awareness.
See also[edit]
Awareness ribbon
Choiceless awareness
Consciousness
Feldenkrais method
Indefinite monism
Philosophy of mind
Raising awareness
Yoga Nidra
Legal awareness
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-awareness
2.Jump up ^ Self-awareness: its nature and development. New York, NY: Guilford P
ress. 1998. pp. 12 13. ISBN 1-57230-317-4.
3.Jump up ^ Consciousness in the Raw, Science News Online, September 2007
4.Jump up ^ Sylvester CM, Shulman GL, Jack AI, Corbetta M (December 2007). "Asym
metry of anticipatory activity in visual cortex predicts the locus of attention
and perception". J. Neurosci. 27 (52): 14424 33. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3759-07.200
7. PMID 18160650.
5.Jump up ^ Wyart, V.; Tallon-Baudry, C. (July 2009). "How Ongoing Fluctuations
in Human Visual Cortex Predict Perceptual Awareness: Baseline Shift versus Decis
ion Bias". Journal of Neuroscience. 29 (27): 8715 8725. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0962
-09.2009. PMID 19587278.
6.Jump up ^ Capra, Fritjof (1996). The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understandi
ng of Living Systems. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-47676-0.
7.Jump up ^ Gutwin, Carl; Greenberg, Saul (September 2002). "A Descriptive Frame
work of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware". Computer Supported Coopera
tive Work (CSCW). 11 (3-4): 411 446. doi:10.1023/A:1021271517844.
8.Jump up ^ Dourish, Paul; Bellotti, Victoria (1992). "Awareness and Coordinatio
n in Shared Workspaces". Computer Supported Cooperative Work (November): 107 114.
doi:10.1145/143457.143468.
9.Jump up ^ Schmidt, Kjeld (2002). "The problem with 'awareness': Introductory r
emarks on 'awareness in CSCW'". Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 11 (3-4): 2
85 298. doi:10.1023/A:1021272909573.
10.Jump up ^ Gutwin, Carl; Greedberg, Saul (1999). A framework of awareness for
small groups in sharedworkspace groupware (Technical Report 99-1 ed.). Universit
y of Saskatchewan, Canada: Department of Computer Science.
11.Jump up ^ Greenberg, Saul; Gutwin, Carl; Cockburn, Andy (1996). "Awareness Th
rough Fisheye Views in Relaxed-WYSIWIS Groupware". Proceedings of the conference
on Graphics interface '96: 28 38.
External links[edit]
Look up awareness in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Awareness
LaBar KS, Disterhoft JF (1998). "Conditioning, awareness, and the hippocampus".
Hippocampus. 8 (6): 620 6. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-1063(1998)8:6<620::AID-HIPO4>3.0

.CO;2-6. PMID 9882019.

Cornell University: Recent findings in the awareness of brain damaged people.

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