[4] Awareness can be described as something that occurs when the brain is activated in certain ways, such as when the color red is seen once the retina is stimulated by light waves.
"[9] Peripheral awareness refers to the human ability to process information regarding all five senses at the periphery of attention, such as acknowledging the distant sounds of people outside while sitting indoors and concentrating on a specific task, such as reading.
For example, when walking down a busy street while talking to a friend, peripheral awareness will allow for alertness to potential hazards such as cars or pedestrians coming into proximity that may not have been noticed otherwise.
[citation needed] Popular ideas about consciousness suggest the phenomenon describes self-awareness, the condition of being aware of oneself.
Bjorn Merker,[19] 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 vertebrates.
Psychologist Carroll Izard emphasizes that this form of primary consciousness consists of the capacity to generate emotions and awareness of one's surroundings, but not an ability to talk about what one has experienced.
Due to this discovery, medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical activity face a serious challenge.
[20] Throughout the brain stem, there are interconnected regions that regulate eye movement that are also involved in organizing information about what to do next, such as reaching for a piece of food or pursuing a potential mate.
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.
[25] In this setting, awareness is meant to convey how individuals monitor and perceive the information surrounding their colleagues and the environment they are in.
The term covers a common interest in whereabouts of remote entities, especially individuals and their cohesion in operation.
Using this technique, a patient who fulfilled all of the clinical criteria for the vegetative state was shown to be covertly aware and able to willfully respond to commands by looking at their brain activity.