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Language Hat mentions an excellent word: apophenia -- "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena."

Clearly, it is related to both creativity and madness, the Hat notes, and I would add too, to the rush of the early stages of a research project. I remember especially the heady quality of undergraduate inspiration as experienced at an institution with seemingly infinite library resources. The glittering web branching from the handful of facts, ideas, texts that were your points of entry was sure to hypnotize. It was always especially bright and intricate where it passed through the first half of the 19th century, a glorious period of associations still unfettered by the boundaries of the modern disciplines and methodologies. Phylogeny recapitulates ontology, the undergraduate mind is like that of an armchair scholar in about 1830, and the overlap of that stage of one's own intellectual development with that stage in the history of scholarship could produce a juvenile delirium of interconnection (o, the burning warp, the glowing weft!), a state of shamanic fever that quite overpowered sleep.

Apophenia is a Greek root. Waxing lexigraphical, I would propose an Icelandic heiti for this phenomenon. In honor of Finnur Magnússon, the peerless decoder of the inscription at Runamo, let us call apophenia Finnssýki - Finnur's disease. My friends will know that I am not sarcastic with this, I mean no disrespect. Quite the reverse, quite the reverse.