I first encounted the "neural lace" idea in Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, where it is called "nanonics". My favourite imagining of such a device is

I first encounted the "neural lace" idea in Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, where it is called "nanonics". My favourite imagining of such a device is in Peter Watt's "Echopraxia" where it's used to create a hive mind by physics monks.