Simplifying academic knowledge to make cognition more efficient: opportunities, benefits and barriers

Much academic knowledge is unnecessarily complicated and could be simplified, and made easier to learn, understand and use, without sacrificing its power and usefulness. There are many historical examples of such simplifications, ranging from the replacement of Roman numerals by the decimal system, to the beautifully simple theories of Newton and Darwin. This article explores the possibility of further simplifying the knowledge that academics create and disseminate, giving examples from various fields. The benefits, in terms of savings of time and enhancement of the power and accessibility of academic knowledge, are potentially enormous.