Do you think there's a shared sub- or unconscious at work?

Or do you think the times elicit the same sort of actions, ideas and inventions from everyone during a certain period? Lots of alternative energy innovation is going on right now. Lots of new technology is coming to light. But ideas my husband proposed and took no farther five years ago must have been invented or conceptualized by somebody else at about that same time, because they’ve been put into physical form and we just saw a documentary about one.

Are we all just tapping into the human sub- or unconscious pool, or is everybody just intending the same thing?