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The "blooming, buzzing confusion" of William James (2010)

I investigate the origin of a well-known quote by William James, which refers to "a baby's first experience of the world." Includes excerpts from James' Principles of Psychology (1890)

I rather like that point – that what we think of as “simple sensations” actually involve “discrimination carried to a high pitch.” It reminds me of information-theoretic analyses of the processing potential of the retina and optic nerve, which take gigabits of information per second and discard most of it so that the signal can squeeze through a rather narrow bandwidth to the brain. The baby, assailèdby eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once,feels it all as one great blooming, buzzingconfusion; and to the very end of life,our location of all things in one spaceis due to the fact that the originalextents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at oncecoalescèd together into oneand the same space. But if the plain facts be admitted that the pure idea of 'n' is never in the mind at all, when 'm' has once gone before; and that the feeling 'n-different-from-m' is itself an absolutely unique pulse of thought, the bottom of this precious quarrel drops out and neitehr party is left with anything to fight about.

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