Aleksandra (Oleksandra) Halchenko, M.A.
Aleksandra (Oleksandra) Halchenko, M.A. is the Founder and Chief Educational Neuroscientist at Neurocomb25 Lab — a research and practice laboratory built on the Neurocomb25 Model of Cultural Sustainability Transformation: a neuroscience-informed framework for organisational and cultural change, grounded in three metaphors drawn from the beehive.
A paper on the Model has been accepted for presentation at Sustainability, Temporalities and Futures — the 26th International Futures Conference organised by the Finland Futures Research Centre and Finland Futures Academy, University of Turku, 9–10 June 2026 — one of the foremost international gatherings in futures studies and foresight research. An introduction to the Model is also available via What If a Beehive Could Teach Us How to Transform Culture? Introducing the Neurocomb25 Model.
At the heart of both the Lab and the Model lies Aleksandra’s founding contribution: the Science of Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning — the central intellectual architecture from which everything else flows. This is not incidental to the Neurocomb25 Model but constitutive of it: Learning corresponds to the Process of Change, Unlearning to the People of Change — the embedded specialists who help organisations release outdated practices, beliefs, and methods — and Relearning to the Content of Change, the new knowledge and wisdom that takes their place.
Aleksandra is the pioneer of this Science as a distinct field of inquiry at the intersection of neuroscience, education, and human development. From the Latin educare — to draw out, to lead forth — genuine human development was never meant to be the filling of a vessel but the calling forward of what is already latent within a person. Learning and life cultivation are often complementary, yet distinct: learning focuses on acquiring knowledge and skills, while cultivation emphasises inner transformation, wisdom, and the refinement of character over time.
Aleksandra approaches both — and insists that neither can be complete without the movement that makes both possible: unlearning. Before new knowledge can truly take root, and before genuine transformation can occur, what is outdated, limiting, or simply no longer true must first be consciously released. This three-phase cycle — learning, unlearning, and relearning — is not a pedagogical technique but a fundamental architecture of human development, one that applies with equal force to the student, the executive, the leader, and anyone who has ever found themselves living by a map that no longer matches the territory.
She approaches all three phases through a unified cognitive, affective, and conative framework — insisting that thinking, feeling, and willing are not separate channels but a single, indivisible act of being human. This science was not invented at a desk. It was lived into across a decade of cross-disciplinary formation that is itself an enactment of the three dimensions it proposes.
Aleksandra’s intellectual journey began with Philology at the Black Sea National University of Petro Mohyla, where her thesis in cognitive poetics and cognitive literary studies planted the foundational insight that language and metaphor are not merely vehicles for meaning but cognitive architectures that organise thought itself — seeds from which both Bonsai Thinking and the Black Swan Verses genre would eventually grow.
From philology she moved into the dimension her framework calls affection: a year-long certificate in Happiness Studies from the Happiness Studies Academy under the direct mentorship of Tal Ben-Shahar, where Antonovsky’s salutogenesis, the empirical conditions of flourishing, and the relationship between coherence and sustained wellbeing became not intuitions but scientifically anchored convictions. The third and defining phase was the Master’s in Educational Neuroscience at UCL and Birkbeck, University of London, where cognitive and affective formation found their neuroscientific grounding, and the question of conation — the faculty of willing, intending, and acting — emerged as the missing third that neither cognitive nor affective neuroscience had adequately addressed.
Cognition, affection, conation: the science was lived before it was named. Aleksandra is an education professional who approaches learning, policy, and practice through rigorously interdisciplinary lenses — examining how neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, philology, politics, technology, art and culture, economics, and geography each shape what it means to learn and to develop as a human being. This commitment to breadth is not academic eclecticism but a principled insistence that no single discipline can hold the full complexity of human development on its own. It has led her, among other pursuits, to two semesters of Middle Eastern Studies at the Oxford Department of Continuing Education, studying under British journalist Trevor Mostyn — a deliberate effort to examine education from a geopolitical and historical perspective, understanding how power, culture, and civilizational encounter shape the conditions in which learning does or does not become possible.
In Michaelmas Term 2023, she completed the course Islam in the World Today, submitting a futures studies analysis entitled “Saudi Arabia Has Allowed Women to Drive. Is Crown Prince Muhammad ibn Salman Planning to Democratize the Kingdom?”, for which she was awarded 10 CATS points. In Michaelmas Term 2024, she completed Britain, France and The Middle East: Colonial Perfidy or ‘Civilising Mission?’, submitting a paper entitled “The People of the Book: The Significance of the Millet System in Ottoman Turkey”, and was again awarded 10 CATS points.
Her most original scientific contribution is the proposal and founding of Conative Neuroscience — the systematic study of the neural and educational mechanisms of willing, intending, and futures-imagination, a dimension almost entirely absent from educational research until her work. In March 2026, she presented The Science of Relearning: Exploring Educational Implications of Bringing Conation Back and Founding Conative Neuroscience at the 13th MindBrainBody Symposium at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, proposing Aesthetic Intelligence (AQ) as the operationalization of conation in educational contexts. The same body of research was presented at the 36th Cambridge Neuroscience Seminar at Queen’s College, Cambridge — an annual gathering that typically features Cambridge’s own researchers alongside just two external guest speakers, making the invitation itself a mark of the work’s significance.
This scientific architecture is made teachable through a conceptual, framing, and pedagogical metaphor Aleksandra developed: Bonsai Thinking. Drawing on the philosophy of bonsai cultivation — patient, intentional, shaped by both constraint and care — the framework approaches human development as a three-dimensional lifelong process. Life-long learning reflects the insight that everything in nature is never complete — the ongoing construction of knowledge across a lifetime, transforming personal experience into meaningful, systemic understanding.
Life-wide learning addresses the environment: the cultivation of meaningful, controlled environments from which learning is drawn, recognizing that what surrounds the learner is constitutive of what can be learned. Life-deep learning honors the uniqueness of each individual’s trajectory — as bonsai involves shaping each tree toward its own specific aesthetic, the art of learning is the shaping of a life toward a specific purpose. The three dimensions map directly onto her neuroscientific triad: cognition through reframing and critical reflection; affection through mindfulness and emotional attunement; and conation oriented toward future coherence.
In January 2024, Aleksandra presented Bonsai Thinking at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Causal Cognition in Humans and Machines at the University of Oxford, jointly organized by the Department of Computer Science and Oxford Quantinuum. The framework has since been developed into Bonsai Executive Coaching and the Bonsai Executive Coaching Teacher Training Course — accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) as Continuing Coach Education — the first and only executive coaching certification in the Science of Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning.
In 2022, Aleksandra pioneered an entirely new literary genre: The Black Swan Verses: PostScriptum Poetry — a cognitive tool for learning, unlearning, and relearning grounded in Aaron Antonovsky’s theory of salutogenesis. Antonovsky demonstrated that well-being is not determined by the absence of difficulty but by a person’s capacity to make sense of it — what he called the Sense of Coherence: the degree to which experience feels comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. The Black Swan Verses enact this movement structurally. Each poem holds the raw experience in its body, followed by a P.S. — the retrospective reframe that transforms not what happened but what it means, constructing the coherence that Antonovsky identified as among the most robust predictors of sustained human wellbeing. The genre’s animating principle — when coherence emerges, happiness follows — is not motivational but scientific.
In 2026, Aleksandra launched Black Swan Verses Coaching, bringing this methodology into structured practice for leaders and organizations navigating complexity and change. Aleksandra’s understanding of where learning and life cultivation occur extends beyond the interior life of the learner to the built environment itself. Physical spaces are not neutral containers but active cognitive and affective agents, capable of supporting or inhibiting learning, unlearning, and relearning. Each phase carries distinct neurological requirements: learning demands conditions for focused attention and encoding; unlearning requires psychological safety in which established mental models can be questioned; relearning calls for spaces that invite experimentation and embodied exploration.
This interface between the science of learning and spatial design was deepened by her participation as a Fellow in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Fellowship in Sustainability for Ukraine — September 2025 to April 2026 — which convened Ukrainian professionals across civic sectors to examine reconstruction through the intersecting lenses of change leadership, environmental health, and sustainable development. Aleksandra brought her distinctive lens to this work: that reconstruction is not merely an infrastructural challenge but a learning and systems-thinking challenge — one that demands the capacity to prototype under uncertainty and build environments capable of enabling the kind of human flourishing that a society’s rebuilding ultimately requires.
Aleksandra’s work as a reformer extends to a concrete curricular intervention: the New Era Subjects™ Programme for Schools — a program in Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning — which she introduced at the Learning Planet Festival on 23 January 2026, a global festival of education organized by the Learning Planet Institute. The Programme proposes three new subjects for schools, each corresponding to one phase of the cycle and one dimension of her neuroscientific triad: Neuroscience — the subject of Learning, understanding how the brain works, cognitive development, and optimising learning potential; Happiness — the subject of Unlearning, building spiritual intelligence, wellbeing, resilience, and the capacity to release what no longer serves; and Future Studies — the subject of Relearning, developing foresight, aesthetic intelligence, pattern recognition, and the capacity to engage with emerging global challenges.
The argument underlying the Program is direct: industrial-age curricula were designed for a world that no longer exists, and no amount of reform within existing subjects can equip young people for the complexity of the 21st century. New Era Subjects™ are not enrichment — they are the missing architecture of a genuinely contemporary education. Aleksandra’s work as a scientist is inseparable from her identity as an educator — and as an educator-reformer.
She holds Qualified Teacher Status in the United Kingdom, began teaching at the age of fourteen, became a teacher trainer for Cambridge University Press at twenty-seven, and subsequently moved into academic management roles in the UK. It is precisely this trajectory — from the classroom to the training room to institutional leadership — that makes her a reformer rather than merely a critic. She has worked inside education at every level, from the individual learner to the institution, and it is from that position of deep insider knowledge that she understands not only where the system fails but why: because it has systematically neglected the affective and conative dimensions of human development, reduced learning to the acquisition of measurable knowledge, and left both unlearning and life cultivation entirely outside its remit.
The Science of Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning is, among other things, her answer to that failure. She knows nine languages, of which she speaks five fluently — a capacity that, like everything else in her formation, she regards not as an accomplishment but as an epistemological tool: the recognition that each language is not merely a different code but a different way of organising reality, and that moving between them is itself a practice of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
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