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Oliver Sacks – Hallucinations

As a little boy, I showed an abnormal aptitude for mathematics, which I completely lost in my singularly talentless youth.

This gift played a horrible part in tussles with quinsy or scarlet fever, when I felt enormous spheres and huge numbers swell relentlessly in my aching brain. . . . I had read . . . about a certain Hindu calculator who in exactly two seconds could find the seventeenth root of, say

 352947114576027513401897342055866171392

(I am not sure I have got this right; anyway the root was 212).

Such were the monsters that thrived on my delirium, and the only way to prevent them from crowding me out of myself was to kill them by extracting their hearts.

But they were far too strong, and I would sit up and laboriously form garbled sentences as I tried to explain things to my mother.

Beneath my delirium she recognized sensations she had known herself, and her understanding would bring my expanding universe back to a Newtonian norm.