Understanding the Learning Brain

How does the brain learn? What allows it to adapt, remember and make sense of the world?

These questions shaped the scientific work of Prof. Dr. Henning Scheich (1942–2025), founding director of the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg. His research helped establish learning, memory and brain plasticity as central questions of neuroscience in Magdeburg and beyond. In his honor, the LIN hosts a scientific symposium dedicated to the learning brain, its mechanisms, its history and its future.

“Learning is a process of restructuring - slow, fragile, and accompanied by pauses and mistakes.” (Henning Scheich)

Henning Scheich’s understanding of learning points beyond the laboratory. It describes how brains adapt, how scientific ideas develop and how institutions grow. The symposium takes this thought as its starting point: bringing together long-standing colleagues, companions and members of the next generation of neuroscientists to honor his work by continuing the questions that shaped it.

The program includes scientific sessions, time for personal exchange and a panel discussion featuring former contemporaries and colleagues of Henning Scheich: “What former predictions tell us about the future of Neuroscience”. The discussion will be inspired by the so-called manifesto “Eleven Leading Neuroscientists on the Present and Future of Brain Research” published in Gehirn & Geist in 2004.