Consciousness of garbled answers with disheartened age (9)
I believe the answer is:
awareness
'consciousness' is the definition.
(I know that awareness is a type of consciousness)
'garbled answers with disheartened age' is the wordplay.
'garbled' indicates an anagram.
'with' means one lot of letters go next to another.
'disheartened' means to remove the middle letters (the middle or heart is removed).
'age' with its centre taken out is 'ae'.
'answers' put after 'ae' is 'aeanswers'.
'aeanswers' anagrammed gives 'AWARENESS'.
'of' acts as a link.
(Other definitions for awareness that I've seen before include "Recognition" , "Grasp" , "Consciousness,knowingness" , "Consciousness, sentience" , "Knowledge (of a fact)" .)