diff --git a/docs/docs/concepts/index.md b/docs/docs/concepts/index.md
index 69d373016..ea6140c8d 100644
--- a/docs/docs/concepts/index.md
+++ b/docs/docs/concepts/index.md
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ Low Level Concepts
 - [State](low_level.md#state)
     - [Schema](low_level.md#schema)
     - [Reducers](low_level.md#reducers)
-    - [MessageState](low_level.md#messagestate)
+    - [MessageState](low_level.md#working-with-messages-in-graph-state)
 - [Nodes](low_level.md#nodes)
     - [`START` node](low_level.md#start-node)
     - [`END` node](low_level.md#end-node)
diff --git a/docs/docs/concepts/low_level.md b/docs/docs/concepts/low_level.md
index 8f0763f78..9d1541643 100644
--- a/docs/docs/concepts/low_level.md
+++ b/docs/docs/concepts/low_level.md
@@ -49,6 +49,7 @@ The main documented way to specify the schema of a graph is by using `TypedDict`
 By default, the graph will have the same input and output schemas. If you want to change this, you can also specify explicit input and output schemas directly. This is useful when you have a lot of keys, and some are explicitly for input and others for output. See the [notebook here](../how-tos/input_output_schema.ipynb) for how to use.
 
 By default, all nodes in the graph will share the same state. This means that they will read and write to the same state channels. It is possible to have nodes write to private state channels inside the graph for internal node communication - see [this notebook](../how-tos/pass_private_state.ipynb) for how to do that.
+
 ### Reducers
 
 Reducers are key to understanding how updates from nodes are applied to the `State`. Each key in the `State` has its own independent reducer function. If no reducer function is explicitly specified then it is assumed that all updates to that key should override it. Let's take a look at a few examples to understand them better.
@@ -78,22 +79,44 @@ class State(TypedDict):
 
 In this example, we've used the `Annotated` type to specify a reducer function (`operator.add`) for the second key (`bar`). Note that the first key remains unchanged. Let's assume the input to the graph is `{"foo": 1, "bar": ["hi"]}`. Let's then assume the first `Node` returns `{"foo": 2}`. This is treated as an update to the state. Notice that the `Node` does not need to return the whole `State` schema - just an update. After applying this update, the `State` would then be `{"foo": 2, "bar": ["hi"]}`. If the second node returns `{"bar": ["bye"]}` then the `State` would then be `{"foo": 2, "bar": ["hi", "bye"]}`. Notice here that the `bar` key is updated by adding the two lists together.
 
-### MessageState
+### Working with Messages in Graph State
+
+#### Why use messages?
+
+Most modern LLM providers have a chat model interface that accepts a list of messages as input. LangChain's [`ChatModel`](https://python.langchain.com/v0.2/docs/concepts/#chat-models) in particular accepts a list of `Message` objects as inputs. These messages come in a variety of forms such as `HumanMessage` (user input) or `AIMessage` (LLM response). To read more about what message objects are, please refer to [this](https://python.langchain.com/v0.2/docs/concepts/#messages) conceptual guide.
+
+#### Using Messages in your Graph
+
+In many cases, it is helpful to store prior conversation history as a list of messages in your graph state. To do so, we can add a key (channel) to the graph state that stores a list of `Message` objects and annotate it with a reducer function (see `messages` key in the example below). The reducer function is vital to telling the graph how to update the list of `Message` objects in the state with each state update (for example, when a node sends an update). If you don't specify a reducer, every state update will overwrite the list of messages with the most recently provided value. If you wanted to simply append messages to the existing list, you could use `operator.add` as a reducer.
+
+However, you might also want to manually update messages in your graph state (e.g. human-in-the-loop). If you were to use `operator.add`, the manual state updates you send to the graph would be appended to the existing list of messages, instead of updating existing messages. To avoid that, you need a reducer that can keep track of message IDs and overwrite existing messages, if updated. To achieve this, you can use the prebuilt `add_messages` function. For brand new messages, it will simply append to existing list, but it will also handle the updates for existing messages correctly.
+
+#### Serialization
+
+In addition to keeping track of message IDs, the `add_messages` function will also try to deserialize messages into LangChain `Message` objects whenever a state update is received on the `messages` channel. See more information on LangChain serialization/deserialization [here](https://python.langchain.com/v0.2/docs/how_to/serialization/). This allows sending graph inputs / state updates in the following format:
+
+```python
+# this is supported
+{"messages": [HumanMessage(content="message")]}
+
+# and this is also supported
+{"messages": [{"type": "human", "content": "message"}]}
+```
 
-`MessageState` is one of the few opinionated components in LangGraph. `MessageState` is a special state designed to make it easy to use a list of messages as a key in your state. Specifically, `MessageState` is defined as:
+Since the state updates are always deserialized into LangChain `Messages` when using `add_messages`, you should use dot notation to access message attributes, like `state["messages"][-1].content`. Below is an example of a graph that uses `add_messages` as it's reducer function.
 
 ```python
 from langchain_core.messages import AnyMessage
 from langgraph.graph.message import add_messages
 from typing import Annotated, TypedDict
 
-class MessagesState(TypedDict):
+class GraphState(TypedDict):
     messages: Annotated[list[AnyMessage], add_messages]
 ```
 
-What this is doing is creating a `TypedDict` with a single key: `messages`. This is a list of `Message` objects, with `add_messages` as a reducer. `add_messages` basically adds messages to the existing list (it also does some nice extra things, like convert from OpenAI message format to the standard LangChain message format, handle updates based on message IDs, etc).
+#### MessagesState
 
-We often see a list of messages being a key component of state, so this prebuilt state is intended to make it easy to use messages. Typically, there is more state to track than just messages, so we see people subclass this state and add more fields, like:
+Since having a list of messages in your state is so common, there exists a prebuilt state called `MessagesState` which makes it easy to use messages. `MessagesState` is defined with a single `messages` key which is a list of `AnyMessage` objects and uses the `add_messages` reducer. Typically, there is more state to track than just messages, so we see people subclass this state and add more fields, like:
 
 ```python
 from langgraph.graph import MessagesState