Remembrance of everything past [Spectral Lines]

THE PURSUIT OF ENHANCED cognition–from sharper recall to more lucid reasoning–is now the greatest animating impulse behind innovative computer engineering. Across the world, clever designers are leveraging ever-expanding storage, processing power, and communications networks to build personalized encyclopedias that document all aspects of an individual´s inner and outer lives. If the engineers have their way, every idea, memory, and feeling–the recorded consciousness of a single lifetime–will be stored in the cloud.