Senseappears

Senseappears is a neologism used in discussions of perception to denote the moment or process by which a sensory input becomes consciously perceived. In this framing, a stimulus is detected by sensory registers but only later does it become a percept that the subject experiences as an identifiable sensation. The term emphasizes the transition from subconscious processing to conscious appearance rather than mere detection.

Coined in the early 2020s within cognitive science and phenomenology circles, senseappears blends “sense” with “appears” to stress perceptual onset. It has no formal definition in major textbooks and remains contested; some writers treat it as a useful shorthand for attention-mediated emergence of a percept, while others consider it redundant with existing terms such as awareness, perception, or salience.

Mechanistically, senseappears is associated with attentional selection and feature binding. In bistable or ambiguous displays, one percept’s senseappears as it becomes dominant in awareness. In everyday perception, a faint odor may have waited in perceptual background until attention highlights it, at which point the odor’s sense appears. In vision, a briefly flashed color might be processed at early stages but only becomes part of conscious perception when it senseappears.

Reception to the term is limited and experimental; some scholars propose formalization in models of perceptual awareness, while others caution against proliferating neologisms without clear distinctions from established concepts such as perception, awareness, and salience.

See also: consciousness, attention, perception, salience.