William James, the greatest writer of all psychologists, has a typically striking image that might help invoke the experience. He himself applied it not to babies but to the brilliant but scatterbrained among adults. In some people, he says, the field of consciousness is like a narrowly focused beam with darkness all round it. For others, and I would argue for babies, “we may suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas.”
