When I first ran across E2 and got a feel for what it was, it instantly reminded me of the SciFi novel Beggars In Spain by Nancy Kress. In the second half of the book, the first generation of genetically engineered "Sleepless" takes the next step and creates offspring with highly increased intelligence, called "Superbrights". In developing these new characters, Kress describes their thoughts as "strings": Every word and concept has strings linking it to other concepts. The connections can be obvious or seemingly arbitrary. Does this sound familiar yet? These grow considerably more elaborate as the Superbrights grow older, and one of them develops an application that will display an entire thought-string-structure in three dimensions, and then a program that will translate the strings of one Superbright to another's for ease of communication (seems everyone's strings are a little different). I suspect most of us can easily relate to the idea of one thought leading to another, and the conceptual "hyperlinks" our brains form over time, but for the Superbrights these visualized, three-dimensional strings are absolutely fundamental to the thought process itself.