Awareness is a filtering mechanism, a way of interpreting one's perceptions. Senses provide us is a three-dimensional picture of the world, but it is awareness that converts that picture into an inter-arrangement of objects and some associations called up by those objects. The process is analogous for other senses. For most people the sight of a falling apple is probably perceived as an edible object moving downward, and not much more. For Isaac Newton, however (if the legend is true), a falling apple may stand for the work of many years and the moment of discovery.
Unlike sensory perception, awareness is very individual dependent. People manage to coexist in societies and understand each other to some degree only because of a strict set of awareness standards imposed on us by the social and cultural environment. Public education is an attempt to standardize and perhaps enhance awareness in specific environments. These enhancements largely result from and depend on specialization and refinement. For example, an astrophysicist may regard each star in the night sky, seen like a dot of light, as a world similar to our solar system. This ability to change perspective is an indispensable tool in a highly specialized profession.
