50 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind must be counteracted by a pragmatic tendency to remove items from the attentional focus if giving them attention is not providing sufficient utility in terms of the achievement of system goals. The synthesis and analysis perspective provides a more systematic perspective on this self- reinforcing dynamic. Synthesis occurs in the attentional focus when two or more items in the focus are combined to form new items, new relationships, new ideas. This happens continually, as one of the main purposes of the attentional focus is combinational. On the other hand, Analysis then occurs when a combination that has been speculatively formed is then linked in with the remainder of the mind (the “unconscious”, the vast body of knowledge that is not in the attentional focus at the given moment in time). Analysis basically checks to see what support the new combination has within the existing knowledge store of the system. Thus, forward-analysis basically comes down to “generate and test”, where the testing takes the form of attempting to integrate the generated structures with the ideas in the unconscious long- term memory. One of the most obvious examples of this kind of dynamic is creative thinking (Boden, 2003; Goertzel, 1997), where the attentional focus continually combinationally creates new ideas, which are then tested via checking which ones can be validated in terms of (built up from) existing knowledge. The analysis stage may result in items being pushed out of the attentional focus, to be replaced by others. Likewise may the synthesis stage: the combinations may overshadow and then replace the things combined. However, in human minds and functional AI minds, the attentional focus will not be a complete chaos with constant turnover: Sometimes the same set of ideas — or a shifting set of ideas within the same overall family of ideas — will remain in focus for a while. When this occurs it is because this set or family of ideas forms