Dear Mehmet,

         I think yours are meaningful questions, and you have already received several reasonable answers to them.  To me the most reasonable are those from Jonny.  I appreciate his critical judgment and his epistemological and methodological caution.  Frankly, after more than five decades of working in cognitive neuroscience (especially prefrontal cortex) and psychiatry—with some familiarity with Jungian psychology—I admit I have nothing more reasonable to offer here.  Nonetheless, I will briefly summarize a few basic points that are central to my way of viewing the problem, if not solving it.

1.  The nearest I can find to the concept of a “collective self” is what I call “phyletic memory.” This is is the “memory of the species:” a structural and dynamic complex of neural formations and mechanisms, acquired in evolution, that not only represent but also contain the basic modes of adapting the organism to the world and to others.

2.  Since evolution is a collective (i.e. population) phenomenon, those formations and mechanisms transcend the self, they are present and operative in all the members of the same species—here the human. Essentially, we are born with them as they are genetically encoded.

3. Although you could argue that the entire nervous system could be called phyletic memory, the latter contains some components that most directly bear on what you characterize as the collective self: (a) limbic and autonomic structures serving basic drives (hypothalamus, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, autonomic nervous system); and (b) sensory and motor systems up to and including primary sensory and motor cortices.

 4.  Although culture is part of individual memory and mostly represented in widely distributed, interactive and overlapping cognitive networks of the more plastic cortex of association (prefrontal, parietal, temporal), it contains, however sublimated or rationalized, elements of phyletic memory that are part of our evolutionary legacy: e.g., affiliation (including motherhood) and trust.

5.  Phyletic memory, or your “collective self, “ may be conscious or unconscious.  It works unconsciously to one degree or another in all our cognitive functions (attention, perception, memory, language and intelligence).  Whether, by association, it shows up in dreams in the form of an archetype or a mandala is a matter of speculation.  It is also a matter of speculation whether the fear of snakes, for example, is genetic.  A related argument has been made for such “primitives” as faces or even a universal grammar.  It seems to me, however, that lamarckism is in principle and scientifically out of the question.

 6.  Also out of the question, in my view, is any pretense to anatomically localize in the brain any abstract concept such as the collective self, consciousness, will, freedom or the like.  Any such attempt leads, at best, to an infinite regress, and, at worst, to unacceptable dualism.

         I hope someone will find this helpful.  Cheers, Joaquín            

Forgive my being glib, but I think you might be referring to culture, and it's located in the same place as every other distributed process: everywhere.

For my point of wiev there isn't  just one anatomical representation area for 'collective self'. When we are talking about 'Theory of Mind', inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal sulcus and inferior parietal lobule (which together form temporoparietal junction) and medial prefrontal cortex take action. When we are talking about mirror neuron system in humans the inferior frontal gyrus, precentral gyrus, inferior parietal lobule  and also the temporal, occipital and parietal visual areas take action. So for me the answer for the question is all as the brain is as a 'whole' is a social organ

Dear Jonny, some childs afraid from snake, but they did not fall with it before or nobody tell to them a snake. If this knowledge is not represented in their CNS. All knowledge that is coming from former ancestors transfers to us biologically and be stored our hidden memory. We are all ancestry, not only our own self, each self is not a sole self but is a collective self. Thanks for your argument.

Thank you Mustafa, your answer is very  satisfying. I think that thir respresantation must cover all brain, but it must be different from clasical represantaion system, because of it must not be disappeared when the other systems operate. When the other functional systems operate, the knowledge system of old ancestors must go on to transfer its knowledge to actual operating system communicate with objects. Thank you again for your argument.

If that is what you mean then there are clearer answers that come from sensory physiology. In olfaction, the vomeronasal organ seems to have receptors for specific fear-inducing odorants and specific projections to the amygdala and BNST that can trigger innate fear responses (see 1 and 2); in audition, the acoustic startle response is similarly a product of genetically encoded "innate fear" circuitry. However some innate fear responses seem to be nonspecific, starting from a generalized fear and being conditioned during the animal's lifetime - something that without careful examination would appear indistinguishable from innate fear (see 3). It's really no surprise to see that taxonomically similar organisms exhibit similar innate behavior and responses to external stimuli.

These phenomena are, however, qualitatively different than a collective consciousness. The first distinction that should be made is between evolutionarily innate responses to specific stimuli and a contemporary shared consciousness between people - this could be referred to as vertical vs. horizontal "collective consciousness." It is not the same thing to say that we may have innate predilections towards certain concepts - Jung's archetypes - and to say that unconscious concepts are shared between contemporaneous people (although one may make the argument that this is just the idea of memetics). The second is essentially that of lamarckism - our animal ancestors may have developed specialized neural circuitry for detecting external predators, etc. over time because it was evolutionarily advantageous, but they almost certainly didn't transmit their learned memories or concepts to their children. Third, none of the above evidence points towards a unified 'collective consciousness.' Things that appear phenomenologically unified are computed in radically different parts of the brain, and so what you may be pointing to as a collective consciousness is in many ways indistinguishably from the idea that the distinct (but obviously interconnected) systems in the brain evolved to process information in a particular way that is shared within taxa. Finally, we are so far away from having an understanding of the brain that can account for concepts at all, let alone innate concepts, that speculating about the region responsible for them is almost scientifically irresponsible. It is plausible that the brain innately codes for general classes of concepts like the 'great mother,' but we have just about 0 information with which we might evaluate the truth of that argument. 

Hope that's useful, thanks for the interesting question :)

1: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867410003557

2: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763405000588

3: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/52/6/694/

Given that a kind of collective self installs itself overtime you interact with others, which changes according to progression of interaction as well as the others' brains you interact with, and the persons you interact with, it might very well be that it is impossible to be located in one brain. There are at least two brains implied, as already friends or couples develop their proper code of interacting, and form, a kind of shared self.

I think that every brain has a representation of the collective self, and this representation is the same in every brain. And every person behaves as a part of human superorganisme and behaves as complemantary it [T.M. Ceylan Ortak Benlik, Ayrıntı Yayınları, İstanbul, 2012(Turkish Book)]. Like Ulbricht's saying, for activation of this representation there must be at least  two communicating people. Child and mother are fantastic binary for this and thereof maybe women activate their representation of cellective self easily than men and sense lightly to be a part of this superorganisme and connect each other tightly.

Sure, much of what I said above was a reply to this idea though. Dividing your argument into pieces for analysis:

1)Every brain has a representation of the collective self

2)Every person behaves as part of a human superorganism

3)Activation of the collective self requires a second person

4)Women can activate their sense of collective self more easily than men.

My responses to each of these:

R1) The second paragraph of my previous responses outlines a) how distributed phenomena might look like a coherent collective consciousness b) that the mechanism of its storage/transmission would have a critical impact on how we interpret it, c) that we lack the understanding to make this claim with any evidence, so it might be a reasonable hypothesis but at this point shouldn't be construed as anything more

R2) This is a distinct argument from the presence of a collective self. Whether people behave coherently as a superorganism is not inherently linked to the presence of a collective consciousness: individual people could be responding to (and thus simultaneously creating) influences from the greater human collective, but do not necessarily need to have a shared collective consciousness to do so. Even sand self-organizes.

R3) Not sure of the validity of this claim, but I think it's being used to link arguments 1 and 2. This would have to be substantiated more to argue/make clear testable predictions.

R4) Not sure of the validity of this claim either, and it seems exceptionally dubious. Would also need to be substantiated more.

I have some answers, strating from the end to the fore. Firstly, you know that women has theory of mind two tears early than men. Maybe this high capacity comes from more effective and more active cololective self in women.

In cae of second person, first person can activate his collective self representation field, because of ıts object is visible. And every brain hs a collective representation area and for thi reason our brain is not our brain even if our body is our body. Because of this reason we are leaded and administrated collectively, but we live with our soma and some part of our brain seperately and subjectively.

Dear Mehmet,

         I think yours are meaningful questions, and you have already received several reasonable answers to them.  To me the most reasonable are those from Jonny.  I appreciate his critical judgment and his epistemological and methodological caution.  Frankly, after more than five decades of working in cognitive neuroscience (especially prefrontal cortex) and psychiatry—with some familiarity with Jungian psychology—I admit I have nothing more reasonable to offer here.  Nonetheless, I will briefly summarize a few basic points that are central to my way of viewing the problem, if not solving it.

1.  The nearest I can find to the concept of a “collective self” is what I call “phyletic memory.” This is is the “memory of the species:” a structural and dynamic complex of neural formations and mechanisms, acquired in evolution, that not only represent but also contain the basic modes of adapting the organism to the world and to others.

2.  Since evolution is a collective (i.e. population) phenomenon, those formations and mechanisms transcend the self, they are present and operative in all the members of the same species—here the human. Essentially, we are born with them as they are genetically encoded.

3. Although you could argue that the entire nervous system could be called phyletic memory, the latter contains some components that most directly bear on what you characterize as the collective self: (a) limbic and autonomic structures serving basic drives (hypothalamus, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, autonomic nervous system); and (b) sensory and motor systems up to and including primary sensory and motor cortices.

 4.  Although culture is part of individual memory and mostly represented in widely distributed, interactive and overlapping cognitive networks of the more plastic cortex of association (prefrontal, parietal, temporal), it contains, however sublimated or rationalized, elements of phyletic memory that are part of our evolutionary legacy: e.g., affiliation (including motherhood) and trust.

5.  Phyletic memory, or your “collective self, “ may be conscious or unconscious.  It works unconsciously to one degree or another in all our cognitive functions (attention, perception, memory, language and intelligence).  Whether, by association, it shows up in dreams in the form of an archetype or a mandala is a matter of speculation.  It is also a matter of speculation whether the fear of snakes, for example, is genetic.  A related argument has been made for such “primitives” as faces or even a universal grammar.  It seems to me, however, that lamarckism is in principle and scientifically out of the question.

 6.  Also out of the question, in my view, is any pretense to anatomically localize in the brain any abstract concept such as the collective self, consciousness, will, freedom or the like.  Any such attempt leads, at best, to an infinite regress, and, at worst, to unacceptable dualism.

         I hope someone will find this helpful.  Cheers, Joaquín            

Dear Joaquin;

Thank you for your improving answer. Collective self stands on phyletic memory and also it is its product. Maybe it starts from core self that is Panksepp's description and goes on to objective self that is mine description and it express subjective experiences with objects(T.M. Ceylan Nesne Benliği, Ayrıntı Yay. İstanbul 2013). After this subjective experiences are transferred to collective self with every prostenity. Actually, objective self is a investigator and explorer part of collective self. Human collective self behave  stability of oneselfe like an animal. When an animal runs, its legs are armonic. On account of dispersing collective self to every person, our objective self behaves for completing each other. 

So, if we can find a representation area in the brain about collective self, these areas must communicate each other with any way such as mirror neurons. I think that caudal part of this area starts from periaquaductal gray matter and goes on upright dipersing and ascending and at the cortex level it covers all the cortex and transfers itself to objective self. that is represented majority at the medial PFC.

Collective self operates primary unconsciously and objective self operates primary consciously. But conscious and unconscious complete each other for a continuity between present and past, an equilibrium between collectivity and objectivity, individuality. 

All of us have same behavior pattern, this is not by virtue of the same training method or the same cultural enviroment, in consequence of that you say the same evolutionary process. Thanks again. Mehmet Emin.