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.