Awareness

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

Concept

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 subjective 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 usual sense, because they lack the brain capacity for thought and understanding.

Self-awareness

Main article: Self-awareness

Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes a condition of being aware of one's awareness or, self-awareness.[1] Efforts to describe consciousness in neurological terms have focused on describing networks in the brain that develop awareness of the qualia developed by other networks.[2]

Neuroscience

Neural systems that regulate attention serve to attenuate awareness among complex 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 focused extended consciousness.

Basic awareness

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 cortical contributions, but "primary consciousness" or "basic awareness" as an ability to integrate sensations from the environment with one's immediate goals and feelings in order to guide behavior, springs from the brain stem which human beings share with most of the vertebrates. Psychologist Carroll Izard emphasizes that this form of primary consciousness consists of the capacity to generate emotions and an awareness of one's surroundings, but not an ability to talk about what one has experienced. In the same way, people can become conscious of a feeling that they can't label or describe, a phenomenon that's especially common in pre-verbal infants.

Due to this discovery medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical activity face a serious challenge.

Basic interests

Down the brain stem lie interconnected regions that regulate the direction of eye gaze and organize decisions about what to do next, such as reaching for a piece of food or pursuing a potential mate.

Changes in awareness

The ability to consciously detect an image when presented at near-threshold stimulus varies across presentations. One factor is "baseline shifts" due to top down attention that modulates ongoing brain activity in sensory cortex areas that affects the neural processing of subsequent perceptual judgments.[4] Such top down 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

Outside of neuroscience biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela contributed their Santiago theory of cognition in which they wrote:

Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system.[6]

This theory contributes a perspective that cognition is a process present at organic levels that we don't usually consider to be aware. Given the possible relationship between awareness and cognition, and consciousness, this theory contributes an interesting perspective in the philosophical and scientific dialogue of awareness and living systems theory.

Communications and information systems

In cooperative settings, awareness is a term used to denote “knowledge created through 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 monitor and perceive the information surrounding their colleagues and the environment they are in. This information is incredibly useful and critical to the performance and success of collaborations.[8][9] Awareness can be further defined by breaking it down into a set of characteristics:[10]

Different categories of awareness have been suggested based on the type of information being obtained or maintained:[11]

These categories are not mutually exclusive, as there can be significant overlap in what a particular type of awareness might be considered. Rather, these categories serve to help understand what knowledge might be conveyed by a particular type of awareness or how that knowledge might be conveyed. Workspace awareness is of particular interest to the CSCW community, due to the transition of workspaces from physical to virtual environments.

While the type of awareness above refers to knowledge a person might need in a particular situation, context awareness and location awareness refer to information a computer system might need in a particular situation. These concepts of large importance especially for AAA (authentication, authorization, accounting) applications.

The term of location awareness still is gaining momentum with the growth of ubiquitous 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, especially individuals and their cohesion in operation. The term of context awareness is a superset including the concept of location awareness. It extends the awareness to context features of an operational target as well as to context of an operational area.

Covert awareness

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 horizontal or vertical. They are however able to grab the pencil, using the correct orientation of the hand and wrist. This condition implies that some of the knowledge the mind possesses is delivered through alternate channels than conscious intent.

Other uses

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 understanding about a social, scientific, or political issue, and hence many movements try to foster "awareness" of a given subject, that is, "raising awareness". Examples include AIDS awareness and Multicultural awareness.

Awareness may refer to anesthesia awareness.

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-awareness
  2. ↑ Self-awareness: its nature and development. New York, NY: Guilford Press. 1998. pp. 12–13. ISBN 1-57230-317-4.
  3. ↑ Consciousness in the Raw, Science News Online, September 2007
  4. ↑ Sylvester CM, Shulman GL, Jack AI, Corbetta M (December 2007). "Asymmetry of anticipatory activity in visual cortex predicts the locus of attention and perception". J. Neurosci. 27 (52): 14424–33. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3759-07.2007. PMID 18160650.
  5. ↑ Wyart, V.; Tallon-Baudry, C. (July 2009). "How Ongoing Fluctuations in Human Visual Cortex Predict Perceptual Awareness: Baseline Shift versus Decision Bias". Journal of Neuroscience. 29 (27): 8715–8725. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0962-09.2009. PMID 19587278.
  6. ↑ Capra, Fritjof (1996). The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books. ISBN 0-385-47676-0.
  7. ↑ Gutwin, Carl; Greenberg, Saul (September 2002). "A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware". Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 11 (3-4): 411–446. doi:10.1023/A:1021271517844.
  8. ↑ Dourish, Paul; Bellotti, Victoria (1992). "Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces". Computer Supported Cooperative Work (November): 107–114. doi:10.1145/143457.143468.
  9. ↑ Schmidt, Kjeld (2002). "The problem with 'awareness': Introductory remarks on 'awareness in CSCW'". Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 11 (3-4): 285–298. doi:10.1023/A:1021272909573.
  10. ↑ Gutwin, Carl; Greedberg, Saul (1999). A framework of awareness for small groups in sharedworkspace groupware (Technical Report 99-1 ed.). University of Saskatchewan, Canada: Department of Computer Science.
  11. ↑ Greenberg, Saul; Gutwin, Carl; Cockburn, Andy (1996). "Awareness Through Fisheye Views in Relaxed-WYSIWIS Groupware". Proceedings of the conference on Graphics interface '96: 28–38.

External links

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