Collective consciousness

The French social theorist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) used the term collective consciousness in his The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

Various forms has been identified by other sociologists, going from solidarity attitudes and memes to extreme behaviors like groupthink or herd behavior.

Collective consciousness might be a way of explaining psychic activities or the concurrent discoveries of mankind across the world. "There is nothing new under the sun," applied to this concept means people don't learn anything, they just remember what they already knew.