Richard E. Cytowic is an American neurologist and author who rekindled interest in synesthesia in the 1980s and returned it to mainstream science. 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, Maurice Ravel and Virginia Woolf. His work is the subject of two BBC Horizon documentaries, “Orange Sherbert Kisses” and “Derek Tastes of Earwax”. 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 Man 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.
Cytowic was born on December 16, 1952 in Trenton, New Jersey to a physician father and artist mother, and grew up with an extended family of scientists and artists. His mother is ESPN's "Super Nana Marge", Tim Tebow's No. 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, graduated cum laude from Duke University, and received his M.D. from Wake Forest's Bowman Gray School of Medicine. He studied further at London's Queen Square, and George Washington University Medical Center before founding a private clinic, Capitol Neurology. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from American University. Retired from clinical practice, Cytowic now mentors medical students at George Washington, writes academic and popular nonfiction, and lectures at museums and cultural institutions worldwide such as the Istanbul Biennial. With installation artist he designed an interactive project at the Los Angeles Main Museum, “.” During his North Carolina years, he served as music critic for the Winston-Salem Journal.
Works
;Books
Synesthesia. Cambridge: MIT Press, Essential Knowledge Series.
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".
