 When it is understood in this second way the biased-competition theory accords with the proposal that attention should be taken to have a metaphysical status analogous to that of unison in an orchestra. According to this view it is always a mistake to identify any one process as the attention process (or any set of processes as the attention processes); attention requires the unified activity of whichever processes happen to be relevant to a person’s current task, but, since these vary from one task to the next, it does not require any particular processes to be taking place. Such a view has been developed in work by Christopher Mole, who dubs it the ‘Cognitive Unison Theory’. Metaphysically speaking, such a theory can be understood as a revival of John Locke and F.H. Bradley’s view that attention is a mode of thinking (see  Section 1.3  above). Phenomenologically the view has a precedent in Ribot’s suggestion that attention be identified with ‘monoideism’ (Ribot, 1889, p. 10). It also draws on some ideas about the ‘polymorphousness’ of attention, which were advocated in a 1964 monograph by Alan White, on the basis of considerations drawn from the examination of various ‘heed concepts’ in natural language.