Here at Red Ferret, we’re not just about bringing you the latest and greatest gadgets and paraphernalia, we’re also about self improvement. With that in mind have a squiz at Spreed, an online, speed-reading system designed (like all speed reading tutors) to increase your reading speed and boost retention.

There’s a whole page on the science behind Spreed but the upshot is this; printed pages aren’t designed for easy reading and data retention, they’re designed for aesthetics. Aesthetics are nice, but they don’t help us read. We read text in chunks by recognising the shape of words and by the words before and after the one we’re reading. The Spreed algorithm makes it easier for us by breaking sentences up into chunks that are easy for our brains to digest. By freeing up some of the brain’s runtime, you can throw words at it faster and it will learn to keep up.

You can try it out on their website, or if you sign up, you can set up your own RSS feeds and they’ll spit them out at you, Spreed-style. Oh and there’s also and iPhone version for the five of you out there with iPhones so you can learn on the move. Give it a go, it’s pretty darn cool.

Their first commercial product, Spreed:News, is a revolution in reading in itself. For the past two years the Spreed team has been researching an area of Cognitive Psychology called Eye Science. From this research they have develop a number of algorithms that take into account grammar, syntax and personal reading patterns.

Tags: spreed, speed+reading+tutor, speed+reading, lifehack