FAQs

Not at all. On the contrary, we hope to foster curiosity in the reader. These maps are meant to help readers decide how to engage with a book — or whether to engage at all.

Yes. The maps describe typical shifts, not universal ones. We understand that cognitive shifts occur differently in different readers based on their unique life experiences and prior exposure to ideas.

Some components are AI-assisted, but every inclusion follows a human editorial judgment. They are carefully structured and edited to meet Unsans’ editorial standards.

No — the focus is on thinking shifts, not content coverage. Unsans is concerned with effects on thinking, not internal structure and deliberately avoids summarizing content or chapters. It focuses solely on the central thematic idea of the book, and in that sense, it is not a summary or a gist of the book. Think of a book’s entry on Unsans as a document of after-the-fact impact: the intellectual shift occurring after the reader finishes the book.

This notion encapsulates a distilled insight that remains even after the details of the book fade. It is what remains with the reader long after the book has been put away in their library and forgotten.

A Cognitive Impact Map is a structured way of showing how a book interacts with a reader’s existing mental models. It describes structurally how it impacts their assumptions.

Unsans takes pains to avoid evaluating a book because evaluation distracts from understanding how ideas work on the mind.

These three notions reflect the three core ways books affect thinking and bring about a change in the reader’s thought processes: by questioning assumptions (challenging), redefining problems (reframing), and sharpening intuition (strengthening).