Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness is the title of an English-language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 book

Book

A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...

 on neuroscience

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

 by the neuroscientist

Neuroscientist

A neuroscientist is an individual who studies the scientific field of neuroscience or any of its related sub-fields...

 Gerald M. Edelman

Gerald Edelman

Gerald Maurice Edelman is an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules...

. Yale University Press published the book in 2004 . The book includes a glossary

Glossary

A glossary, also known as an idioticon, vocabulary, or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms...

, a bibliographic note, and an index

Index (publishing)

An index is a list of words or phrases and associated pointers to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document...

. The title alludes to an English-language poem written by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

 in about 1862 . In that poem, Dickinson describes the brain

Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...

 as "wider than the Sky", "deeper than the sea", and "just the weight of God".

In the preface (page xiii), Edelman describes, as follows, the purpose of the book.
The book's content is similar to another one Edelman co-authored: A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

A Universe of Consciousness

A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination is the title of a 2000 book by biologists Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi. The book aims to explain "the neural substrate of consciousness"...

. Both books put forward the theory of neuronal group selection, also known as Neural Darwinism

Neural Darwinism

Neural Darwinism, a large scale theory of brain function by Gerald Edelman, was initially published in 1978, in a book called The Mindful Brain...

. Both books make a distinction between primary consciousness

Primary consciousness

Primary consciousness is a term the American biologist Gerald Edelman coined to describe the ability, found in humans and some animals, to integrate observed events with memory to create an awareness of the present and immediate past of the world around them. This form of consciousness is also...

 and higher-order consciousness.