Education
Duke University; Hun School of Princeton.
Duke University; Hun School of Princeton.
He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times Magazine cover story about James Brady, the Presidential Press Secretary shot in the brain during the assassination attempt on President Reagan. Cytowic’s writing ranges from textbooks and music reviews, to his Metro Weekly "Love Doctor" essays and brief medical biographies of Anton Chekhov and Maurice Ravel. His work is the subject of several documentaries.
In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks writes:
In the 1980, Richard Cytowic made the first neurophysiological studies of synesthetic subjects.
In 1989, he published a pioneering text, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, and this was followed by a popular exploration of the subject in 1993, The Manitoba Who Tasted Shapes. Current techniques of functional brain imaging now give unequivocal evidence for the simultaneous activation or coactivation of two or more sensory areas of the cerebral cortex in synesthetes, just as Cytowic’s work predicted.
His mother is Entertainment and Sports Programming Network"s "Super Nana Marge", Tim Tebow"s Number. 1 fan. As a child, Cytowic liked taking things apart and putting them back together to figure out how they worked.
He attended Hun School of Princeton (class of 1970), graduated cum laude from Duke University, and received his Doctor of Medicine from Wake Forest"s Bowman Gray School of Medicine.
He studied further at London"s Queen Square (Institute of Neurology), and George Washington University Medical Center before founding a private clinic, Capitol Neurology. Retired from clinical practice, Cytowic now mentors medical students at George Washington, writes and lectures. While in North Carolina, he served as music critic for the Winston-Salem Journal.
He is enrolled in the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Sciences at American University.
Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences, Rabun Gap, Georgia. Founded on the estate of Jay Hambidge, the architect and mathematician who conceived of "Dynamic Symmetry".
Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Fellow, Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
BooksWednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (with David Eagleman), Foreword by Dmitri Nabokov (2009). Cambridge:MIT Press The Man Who Tasted Shapes (2003). Cambridge: MIT Press Synesthesia: A Union of The Senses, 2nd edition (2002).
Cambridge: MIT Press The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology (1996). Cambridge:MIT Press Nerve Block For Common Pain (1990). New York:Springer Verlag Reviews and essaysSelected book reviews available hereSelected Love Doctor essays available here.Chekhov and Ravel articles available hereLecturesA filmed gallery talk on synesthesia at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum, given as part of its visual music exhibit.Conversation between Dr. Cytowic and Dr. Richard Frakowiak (London).
Cytowic is a Clinical Associate Professor of Neurology at George Washington University Medical Center, a Mentor at the Point Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Board for Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.