Analogies, even silly ones, can sometimes make things easier to understand.
A free-attention-unit blimp is an imaginary balloon-shaped structure with a suction cup on the front, satellite antenna on the back, and disk drive in the middle. A person remotely steers the free-attentionunit blimp with intention – to send and steer the free-attention-unit, you intend the blimp to where you want it to go. The blimp attaches itself to something, loads the impression of what it is attached to onto its disk drive, and then transmits the data back to you.
At your end, you analyze the data and recognize an oak rocking chair, or a friend, or your favorite episode of a TV program. Sometimes there is so much data in the particular port of call that you intend two blimps or even a whole fleet of blimps to gather and transmit data back to you to analyze.
Some things are so loaded with interest and importance that they require every blimp you can send.
Finally, assuming that every data stream has an end, your interest is satisfied (you got the message), and you intend your free-attention-unit blimps somewhere else.
There are a couple of things that can go wrong in free-attention-unit blimp world. First, the incoming data can be more than you can analyze, so you ignore the message and leave it on the blimp’s disk drive. Now the blimp can’t load quite as much. It is a diminished capacity blimp. Not only does it perceive less, but also when it transmits back to you, it mixes the old data in its memory banks with new data that it just acquired. Past and present mix, and things start looking a little odd, delusional maybe.
But that’s not the worst situation. The worst situation in the free-attention-unit blimp world is that the blimp tries to transmit some data that you want nothing to do with. Maybe it sends some sorrowful news about a friend, or a special bulletin about a personal traumatic event, or some gross-out-horror live shot from an accident scene. Your reaction to this transmission is that you ignore (go deliberately unaware) the data transmission from the blimp. The blimp is forgotten and abandoned, and you’re not quite as observant as you used to be – your blimp fleet is diminished.
When all your blimps are lost, you will have to rely on the relay of post-analyzed data from associates who still have an operational blimp or two. “Tell me what you see.” This is the beginning of indoctrination.
How many abandoned attention blimps are out there? Some quantum theorists would speculate, in effect, that the whole physical universe is nothing more than the garbled transmission of an astronomical number of abandoned attention blimps repeatedly transmitting their disregarded messages.
Perhaps more relevant, a growing body of evidence suggests that people maintain a subconscious connection with their abandoned attention units, and the message that their consciousness refuses to hear is broadcast over and over on subconscious wavelengths.
It is a thoughtful moment when one considers that the chronic pain in his or her knee might really be the transmission of an undelivered message from a longago abandoned attention unit.

Figure 3: Free-Attention Unit Blimp
Some things are so loaded with interest and importance that they require every blimp you can send.