Humans are depicted as standardized assembly line products, slumped and poorly defined, stripped of individual identity from the start.

Sousanis defines 'flatness' as one-dimensional thought and behavior embedded in education systems, making it appear inherent to reality.

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man is shown as a counterpoint to modern humanity, which is now 'boxed into bubbles of its own making.'

Abbott's Flatland is introduced, depicting two-dimensional inhabitants who perceive a three-dimensional penny only as a flat straight line.

The square in Flatland encounters a three-dimensional sphere and experiences a flood of new perceptual possibilities.

Stereoscopic vision is revealed: the distance between human eyes means each sees differently, so there is no single correct view.

Copernicus's heliocentric model is presented as a world-historical rupture that displaced the entrenched Ptolemaic geocentric view of the universe.

Plato's philosophy is cited for dismissing images as 'shadows of shadows,' establishing Western civilization's deep mistrust of the visual.

Descartes' mind-body dualism is presented as leaving humanity disembodied and 'afloat in a sea of words.'

Comics are argued to hold sequential and simultaneous information in productive tension, making them uniquely powerful educational tools.

Flatland's solipsistic monarch, encountered alone in an abyss, is shown to be incapable of conceiving the existence of anyone outside himself.

Imagination is declared the fifth dimension, bridging the otherwise unbridgeable gulf between one person's viewpoint and another's.

A river metaphor shows how repetitive historical action creates a current that carries every newcomer along without their awareness.

The vector is introduced as a figure for being 'separate yet connected,' able to see oneself simultaneously from two vantage points.

The book closes with the image of a baby's open eye, representing infinite openness to perceiving the world anew.

Sousanis opens by depicting modern humans as assembly line products trapped in 'flatness' — a one-dimensional mode of thought reinforced by education systems. Using Edwin Abbott's Flatland as a key metaphor, he shows how limited perception prevents us from seeing beyond our existing dimensions. He then reveals the natural basis for multiple perspectives through stereoscopic vision and world-historical ruptures like Copernicus's heliocentric revolution. Western philosophy's over-reliance on language, traced from Plato to Descartes, is shown to have systematically suppressed visual and embodied knowledge. The comic form is proposed as a solution, and imagination is declared the essential fifth dimension that bridges self and other. The book concludes with a call to continuous perceptual renewal, symbolized by a wide-open baby's eye.

The core argument from flatness to unflattening.

Spinning tops illustrate the dynamic potential energy of infants, which standardizing systems never allow to be released.

A human skeleton compartmentalized in boxes concludes the opening chapter, with the outline of a coffin implied in the final image.

Perseus-like human figures wearing winged sandals appear, symbolizing the act of transcending the limits of current perceptual reality.

Dancing couples illustrate how two people's perspectives continuously shift and reconfigure in dynamic relation to one another.

Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic model of decentered, laterally branching perception is introduced as a challenge to hierarchical thought.

An eyeball containing multiple windows, each housing its own individual eye, illustrates the deeply layered nature of plural perception.

Dogs' multidimensional olfactory sense is cited to show that rich, multi-perspectival perception exists well beyond the human sense of sight.

James Joyce's Ulysses is invoked to show how seeing through multiple perspectives reveals otherwise invisible connections across time and space.

Rudolf Arnheim's assertion that 'to see means to see in relation' anchors the argument that perception is inherently dynamic and relational.

A silhouetted man draws exploratory spiraling tentacles, with the act of drawing framed as a shared journey into the unknown.

A mermaid illustration demonstrates that fusing the known with the unknown is the essential imaginative labor of creating new knowledge.

Stories are described as vehicles that allow readers to reach across time and space to share in another person's viewpoint.

New York City's Manhattan commute is shown to shrink one's world when the same linear, repetitive route is followed daily.

Bruno Latour's view that emancipation means being 'well-attached' rather than free from bonds is illustrated with figures climbing rope networks.

A girl whose hair gradually transforms into wings illustrates how deep engagement with one's environment can produce radical personal transformation.

Beyond the core argument, Sousanis builds his case through a rich sequence of metaphors and examples that bring each chapter's ideas to life. From the infant's wasted spinning-top energy to the Perseus figure soaring on winged sandals, these moments illustrate what unflattening looks and feels like in practice. He draws on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, the multidimensional perception of dogs, and James Joyce's layered vision of everyday life to show that multi-perspectival thinking has many models across history. The chapter on bodies in motion uses drawing, tentacles, and a mermaid to show that perception is inherently dynamic and discovery-oriented. Later, examples like the Manhattan commute and Bruno Latour's 'well-attached' figure clarify how ruts form and why genuine connection, rather than isolation, is the true path to freedom.

Supporting ideas and illustrations that deepen the argument.

A curious, rounded infant is directly contrasted with the stooped adult automaton it will inevitably become through societal standardization.

Italo Calvino's dream of flying 'like Perseus into a different space' is invoked as a model for escaping fixed perceptual reality.

S.I. Hayakawa's insight that every language leaves work undone for other languages is used to argue against verbal exclusivity in knowledge.

The revelation that 'while image is, text is always about' marks a core distinction between visual immediacy and verbal abstraction.

Left and right brain hemispheres are revealed as complementary, with the right's simultaneous, contextual thinking neglected by verbal-dominant education.

Scott McCloud is cited for showing that comics let readers stitch disconnected fragments of image and text into meaningful wholeness.

Multiple vignettes of a single rose demonstrate the inexhaustible perceptual depth that images offer over verbal description alone.

The Mona Lisa is presented in fragmented, disconnected views, proving that imagination is required to complete even the most familiar image.

The image of a Russian doll illustrates the human capacity to simultaneously host a multiplicity of inner worlds and perspectives.

Lewis Mumford's revelation shows how tools originally designed to track celestial activity were inverted into mechanisms for synchronizing human behavior.

A caterpillar-like creature disrupts a wooden-faced boy's rigid daily routine and directly challenges him to question his own identity.

The caterpillar turns the boy upside down, exposing the multiple hidden strings that have silently tethered him to a narrow reality.

A human figure that severs its controlling strings immediately becomes a hollow, emaciated silhouette rather than a liberated being.

John Dewey's concept of being 'positively present' reveals that identity is not fixed but emerges from an ongoing association of forces in motion.

The metaphor of ill-fitting ready-made shoes argues that everyone must find their own unique path rather than inherit someone else's.

This pool traces the pivotal intellectual and emotional turning points that reveal why and how unflattening must occur. Beginning with the stark contrast between the infant's innate curiosity and the automaton it becomes, the events escalate through language's hidden limitations to the revelation that the brain's visual hemisphere has been systematically neglected by education. Midway, the rose and the Mona Lisa become case studies in how imagination completes and endlessly deepens perception. The Interlude 2 sequence — in which a caterpillar disrupts a boy's routine, questions his identity, and turns him upside down to reveal his strings — serves as the book's most dramatic individual narrative. The final events argue that cutting one's strings leads only to emptiness, while true liberation comes from finding one's own path, symbolized by the refusal to wear ill-fitting shoes.