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Posted by Poh-Sun .. during early morning reflection of relationship of one facilitated lunch theme to following afternoon workshop.

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Thank you Poh-Sun and everybody who joined!

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Posted by Poh-Sun on the St. Petersburg to Helsinki Allegro train

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Over the past few decades, commuting times have risen dramatically in most major cities. As inner-city property prices have mounted, many workers are moving further to city peripheries for lower costs - but those searching for cheaper rents are encountering longer commutes. The number of Brits spending two hours a day commuting, for example, had increased by 72% in a decade, according to a 2015 study.

Indeed, the most recent studies available find the typical Londoner spends an average of six hours and 10 minutes each week commuting, while the average New Yorker clocks in slightly more, at six hours and 18 minutes.

Meanwhile, millennials are reading more than their older counterparts. According to a Pew study, 72% of 18- to 29-year-old readers in the US have read a print book in the previous year, more than any other age group. At the same time, a third of book buyers under 44 want to spend less time on digital devices, says the Codex Group, which specialises in book audience research. Print book sales have risen in each of the three last years, following a period of stagnation.
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Publishers are well aware of both these trends, and are actively chasing the 'commuter read'. Penguin has started publishing small-sized books "designed to pick up, pocket, and go", says Philippa Cowburn, a spokeswoman. In a similar vein, Oxford University Press has released a selection of 35,000-word titles, formatted in specialised block paragraphs which aim to make it easier to find your place again after forced breaks in concentration.

If we consider that the average adult reads about 300 words a minute, in the six hours you might commute each week, you could read some 108,000 words, and still have enough time left to check in and update your Twitter. That's about the length of Wuthering Heights, Gulliver's Travels or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Of course, that's assuming you're riding on public transport and have the elbow room to open a book. Those behind the wheel have no such option - unless they're listening to audiobooks, that is.

Even short commutes can be used successfully to read more. So BBC Capital asked: what are the best ways to read, and the best things to read, for your particular commute?

15 minutes or less
Poetry is well-suited to a short commute, says professor Wiebo Brouwer, a neuropsychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He says short commutes best fit "texts with a shorter time scale, like news items or short poems.

"Finishing such a short text offers a moment of choice after, either to read a new short item, to prepare for transfer, or to start a conversation," he says.

Another route in is flash fiction. Works of 1,000 words or fewer, these stories can fit into a journey of a stop or two, says Irish flash fiction author Adam Trodd. A good place to start would be Sleep is a Beautiful Colour, an anthology launched in June this year, in celebration of Flash Fiction Day.

For other morsel-sized reading, publishers are printing concise books with extracts from longer works, such as Penguin's Great Ideas series, or short topic overviews, such as MIT Press's Essential Knowledge and Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.

30 minutes or less
For 30-minute journeys, short story collections are ideal. Joseph Kennedy, deputy head of bookshop at Oxford University Press suggests 'masters of the form' such as Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, and 'new masters' like Lorrie Moore.

"I personally prefer interconnected stories," says publisher Meike Ziervogel, who runs Peirene Press in London. She recommends Breach by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes, The Beggar Maid by Alice Monroe, All That Man Is by David Szalay.

Also fitting nicely into this category are The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, and One Thousand and One Nights, all of them late-mediaeval collections of stories placed within a frame story, each meant to be enjoyed at a different sitting.

Alternatively, OUP's Very Short Introductions "might be perfect for, say, Ealing to Chancery Lane", or Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan or other half-hour commutes, says publisher Luciana O'Flaherty.

She recommends reading non-fiction in the morning and fiction in the evening. For those coming to London, she suggests starting out with classics set along your commute. "Read about Martians invading Surrey as you come in from Richmond. Or The Mark on the Wall from Virginia Woolf, for short pieces on London," she says.

45 minutes or less
For commutes this length, the serial novel really comes into its own. Books like Dickens' Pickwick Papers - the first real publishing phenomenon - appeared in installments (19 in the case of Pickwick), so reading them episode-by-episode is returning to their origin.

Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, the first full-length detective novel, was also serialised by Charles Dickens in a magazine he edited, All the Year Round.

The Three Musketeers appeared initially in serial form in a newspaper, too. So too did Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Epistolary novels, which are told through letters and diary entries, fit well into 45-minute commutes, too: Dracula and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or more recently Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.

60 minutes or more
You lucky commuter - journeys of this length allow enough time to immerse yourself in longer works. "When beginning in a new novel, quite a lot of reading time might be required to build up the internal context for interpreting and appreciating the separate elements of the story, and in a short commute the build up will be incomplete," says professor Brouwer.

Dipping in and out of a lengthy novel duing short journeys, a "commuter might consider that the disappointment of being torn out of the story is worse than the gain of learning only slightly more about the events described in the novel," he says.

At this length, most recent winners of major prizes begin to roll into view - like 2016 Booker winner, Paul Beatty's The Sellout, or the 2015 winner, Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings.

For a non-intimidating entry into this category, try referring to a well-curated list, like The 100 Favourite Novels of Librarians (Pride and Prejudice comes tops), the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century (Ulysses), or the Norwegian Book Clubs' Top 100 Works in World Literature (Don Quixote).

Practice makes perfect
Focusing on reading during short commutes means learning to ignore some stimuli, like people around you or a hot rail carriage - and concentrate on the task at hand, says Dr Tade Thompson, a British consultant psychiatrist and novelist.

"To facilitate this, it helps to make it a habit," says Dr Thompson. Commitment, consistency, and regularity helps to facilitate the brain pathways associated with reading, he says. So keep doing it, and you'll get better at it.

With a bit of practice, you never know - your commute may turn out to be the part of the day you most look forward to.

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our page or message us on .
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Over the past few decades, commuting times have risen dramatically in most major cities. As inner-city property prices have mounted, many workers are moving further to city peripheries for lower costs - but those searching for cheaper rents are encountering longer commutes.

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This is home-brew, not Harvard. And it has worked. Spectacularly. The Oakleys never could have predicted their success. Many of the early sessions had to be trashed. "I looked like a deer in the headlights," Dr. Oakley said. She would flub her lines and moan, "I just can't do this." Her husband would say, "Come on. We're going to have lunch, and we're going to come right back to this." But he confessed to having had doubts, too. "We were in the basement, worrying, 'Is anybody even going to look at this?'"

Dr. Oakley is not the only person teaching students how to use tools drawn from neuroscience to enhance learning. But her popularity is a testament to her skill at presenting the material, and also to the course's message of hope. Many of her online students are 25 to 44 years old, likely to be facing career changes in an unforgiving economy and seeking better ways to climb new learning curves.

Dr. Oakley's lessons are rich in metaphor, which she knows helps get complex ideas across. The practice is rooted in the theory of neural reuse, which states that metaphors use the same neural circuits in the brain as the underlying concept does, so the metaphor brings difficult concepts "more rapidly on board," as she puts it.

She illustrates her concepts with goofy animations: There are surfing zombies, metabolic vampires and an "octopus of attention." Hammy editing tricks may have Dr. Oakley moving out of the frame to the right and popping up on the left, or cringing away from an animated, disembodied head that she has put on the screen to discuss a property of the brain.

Sitting in the Oakleys' comfortable living room, with its solid Mission furniture and mementos of their world travels, Dr. Oakley said she believes that just about anyone can train himself to learn. "Students may look at math, for example, and say, 'I can't figure this out - it must mean I'm really stupid!' They don't know how their brain works."

Her own feelings of inadequacy give her empathy for students who feel hopeless. "I know the hiccups and the troubles people have when they're trying to learn something." After all, she was her own lab rat. "I rewired my brain," she said, "and it wasn't easy."

As a youngster, she was not a diligent student. "I flunked my way through elementary, middle school and high school math and science," she said. She joined the Army out of high school to help pay for college and received extensive training in Russian at the Defense Language Institute. Once out, she realized she would have a better career path with a technical degree (specifically, electrical engineering), and set out to tackle math and science, training herself to grind through technical subjects with many of the techniques of practice and repetition that she had used to let Russian vocabulary and declension soak in.

Along the way, she met Philip Oakley - in, of all places, Antarctica. It was 1983, and she was working as a radio operator at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. (She has also worked as a translator on a Russian trawler. She's been around.) Mr. Oakley managed the garage at the station, keeping machinery working under some of the planet's most punishing conditions.

She had noticed him largely because, unlike so many men at the lonely pole, he hadn't made any moves on her. "You can be ugly as a toad out there and you are the most popular girl," she said. She found him "comfortably confident." After he left a party without even saying hello, she told a friend she'd like to get to know him better. The next day, he was waiting for her at breakfast with a big smile on his face. Three weeks later, on New Year's Eve, he walked her over to the true South Pole and proposed at the stroke of midnight. A few weeks after that, they were "off the ice" in New Zealand and got married.

Dr. Oakley recounts her journey in both of her best-selling books: "A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra)" and, out this past spring, "Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential." The new book is about learning new skills, with a focus on career switchers. And yes, she has a MOOC for that, too.

Dr. Oakley is already planning her next book, another guide to learning how to learn but aimed at 10- to 13-year-olds. She wants to tell them, "Even if you are not a superstar learner, here's how to see the great aspects of what you do have." She would like to see learning clubs in school to help young people develop the skills they need. "We have chess clubs, we have art clubs," she said. "We don't have learning clubs. I just think that teaching kids how to learn is one of the greatest things we can possibly do."

Four Techniques to Help You Learn

FOCUS/DON'T The brain has two modes of thinking that Dr. Oakley simplifies as "focused," in which learners concentrate on the material, and "diffuse," a neural resting state in which consolidation occurs - that is, the new information can settle into the brain. (Cognitive scientists talk about task-positive networks and default-mode networks, respectively, in describing the two states.) In diffuse mode, connections between bits of information, and unexpected insights, can occur. That's why it's helpful to take a brief break after a burst of focused work.

TAKE A BREAK To accomplish those periods of focused and diffuse-mode thinking, Dr. Oakley recommends what is known as the Pomodoro Technique, developed by one Francesco Cirillo. Set a kitchen timer for a 25-minute stretch of focused work, followed by a brief reward, which includes a break for diffuse reflection. ("Pomodoro" is Italian for tomato - some timers look like tomatoes.) The reward - listening to a song, taking a walk, anything to enter a relaxed state - takes your mind off the task at hand. Precisely because you're not thinking about the task, the brain can subconsciously consolidate the new knowledge. Dr. Oakley compares this process to "a librarian filing books away on shelves for later retrieval."

As a bonus, the ritual of setting the timer can also help overcome procrastination. Dr. Oakley teaches that even thinking about doing things we dislike activates the pain centers of the brain. The Pomodoro Technique, she said, "helps the mind slip into focus and begin work without thinking about the work."

"Virtually anyone can focus for 25 minutes, and the more you practice, the easier it gets."

PRACTICE "Chunking" is the process of creating a neural pattern that can be reactivated when needed. It might be an equation or a phrase in French or a guitar chord. Research shows that having a mental library of well-practiced neural chunks is necessary for developing expertise.

Practice brings procedural fluency, says Dr. Oakley, who compares the process to backing up a car. "When you first are learning to back up, your working memory is overwhelmed with input." In time, "you don't even need to think more than 'Hey, back up,' " and the mind is free to think about other things.

Chunks build on chunks, and, she says, the neural network built upon that knowledge grows bigger. "You remember longer bits of music, for example, or more complex phrases in French." Mastering low-level math concepts allows tackling more complex mental acrobatics. "You can easily bring them to mind even while your active focus is grappling with newer, more difficult information."

KNOW THYSELF Dr. Oakley urges her students to understand that people learn in different ways. Those who have "racecar brains" snap up information; those with "hiker brains" take longer to assimilate information but, like a hiker, perceive more details along the way. Recognizing the advantages and disadvantages, she says, is the first step in learning how to approach unfamiliar material.

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Learning to Learn: You, Too, Can Rewire Your Brain

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This is home-brew, not Harvard. And it has worked. Spectacularly. The Oakleys never could have predicted their success. Many of the early sessions had to be trashed. "I looked like a deer in the headlights," Dr. Oakley said. She would flub her lines and moan, "I just can't do this."