Route to madness

There are certain times in research when you follow a thought process to the core and go to the brink of madness. Yes, I mean madness, as opposed to sanity. Certain moments come when you live in the brain, maybe due to pressure of work or the lure of the culmination of a theory. These moments are hard to define. They make impossible things seem possible and unsettle settled views.
Logic takes you to a point when you have the sublime experience of being able to predict many things and to establish many concepts hitherto unknown.
I've felt these moments occasionally during hard research work and thorough spells of reading interesting books.