Aware
Awareness is a state of knowing, understanding, or being conscious of something. Its precise definition is disputed and varies across disciplines. Some accounts treat it as a synonym for consciousness, while others characterize it as cognitive access to information that can occur without subjective experience. Awareness plays a central role in everyday life by helping individuals perceive their surroundings, monitor and regulate their behavior, and make information available to other cognitive processes.
Awareness can take different objects or forms. External awareness concerns objects in the environment, primarily perceived through the five senses. It contrasts with inner awareness, which encompasses bodily sensations, such as pain, and mental states, such as thoughts. Self-awareness involves recognizing oneself as the object of awareness, whereas meta-awareness is awareness of awareness. Focal awareness encompasses contents at the center of attention, in contrast to peripheral awareness. Theorists also examine awareness in nonhuman animals and the possibility of artificial awareness.
To measure awareness, researchers typically use indirect evidence because awareness cannot be directly observed from a third-person perspective. Subjective measures analyze reports from individuals describing their awareness of a stimulus. Objective measures infer awareness from observable behavior, such as task performance, or physiological signals, such as brain activity.
Awareness is relevant to many disciplines. Philosophy seeks to determine its essential features, how it arises, what functions it plays, and what it subjectively feels like. It considers theories about the relation between awareness and matter, how conscious mental states differ from unconscious ones, and how awareness acts as a source of knowledge. Psychology examines the conditions under which people become aware of information, how this information influences their behavior, and how mental disorders impair or distort awareness. Clinical medicine is interested in how anesthetics reduce or prevent awareness during painful medical treatments. Neuroscience studies the relation between the brain and awareness, for example, by searching for brain regions and events that accompany awareness. Several religious traditions regard specific forms of awareness as spiritually significant, such as the Buddhist focus on mindfulness as nonjudgmental awareness associated with equanimity. Other relevant fields include biology, computer science, linguistics, sociology, and marketing research.
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