Long before he ever stepped into a creative writing classroom, Dr. Richard Cytowic, CAS/MFA ’11, learned that every patient arrives with a story already in progress. “The patient is the wounded storyteller,” he says, borrowing a line from physician and author Eugene Frank. “They’re going along with their life with certain expectations, and then suddenly they get sick, and God knows how their story is going to turn out. That’s a narrative problem as much as a medical one.” 

That instinct to translate complexity into human terms has shaped a career that spans neurology, neuroscience writing, and, eventually, American University’s Master of Fine Arts program.  

Raised by a physician father and an artist mother, Cytowic grew up with one foot in each world.  

“I remember squeezing thick tubes of Grumbacher white onto my mother’s palette,” he says, recalling the scent of turpentine and linseed oil drifting upstairs and mixing with the medicinal smells from his father’s office during the time when physicians’ offices were traditionally attached to their homes.  

To him, art and science were never rivals.  

Cytowic followed his father into medicine, earning his MD in neurology and ophthalmology at Wake Forest University, but storytelling tugged at him early. Even as he committed to medicine, he kept learning how language could clarify what felt intimidating. 

That skill became essential in the 1980s, when Cytowic turned his attention to a then-dismissed perceptual phenomenon: synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sense triggers another.  

“I met Michael Watson, the man who tasted shapes,” he says. “I told my colleagues about him, and they immediately asked about his CAT scan. I told them Watson didn’t have a hole in his head—a lesion with something missing—it was something different.” 

When Cytowic began presenting other cases, his colleagues warned him off. The topic was too strange, too “new age,” they said. It could derail his career. 

He ignored them and pressed on 

Part of that resolve, he says, came from personal history. Growing up gay in a time when the state, the church, and even his father’s medical profession labeled him as something that should not exist taught him what it feels like to be told your reality is impossible. So when others dismissed synesthetes as delusional or bogus, he heard a familiar refrain.  

In 1989, he published Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, the first book in English to argue that the condition was a genuine neurological trait. The press was fascinated, even as parts of the academic world remained skeptical. Today, synesthesia is widely accepted, and Cytowic is often credited as one of the field’s pioneers, still invited to lecture internationally. 

After he stopped seeing patients, Cytowic shifted from explaining how to treat the brain to exploring what the brain is. He wrote textbooks, essays, and biographies, always with an eye toward the reader.   

Fiction, however, proved more stubborn.  

“I had written a novel called The Anatomy of Desire, and it got 29 thoughtful rejections,” he shares. “As a result, my agent suggested I take writing classes.”  

Cytowic applied to American University and, to his surprise, was accepted in his mid-50s.  

“Going back to school was the best thing I had done in decades,” he says. 

A lifelong learner, he remained in the program for four years instead of the traditional two, roaming the library stacks and reading all of Virginia Woolf. 

Being a nontraditional student, he says, felt like a gift. He brought life experience; his classmates brought energy and new ways of seeing. The exchange sharpened his prose and his sense of how stories work on the mind. 

Cytowic’s enhanced storytelling shows up in his recent book, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, which examines modern distraction from the brain’s point of view rather than the device’s. Motivated by his own uneasy relationship with his smartphone, the book opens with a story of a Stone Age family moving through a day of hunting, gathering, and long stretches of quiet. The contrast is the point. Our brains evolved for a world of slow change, Cytowic argues, yet we now live inside a storm of alerts and pings. 

The book was shortlisted for the 2025 getAbstract International Book Award in the “Business Impact” category, praised for making rigorous science feel human and usable. 

For Cytowic, that is the real work. “Storytelling puts science in a human perspective,” he says. “It illuminates what’s hidden.”  

At 73, he still wakes up with a sense of purpose. He remains grateful to AU, his most recent alma mater, for giving him the space to reinvent himself.  

“If I knew exactly what I wanted to say before I began,” he says, “I wouldn’t write it. Writing is how you discover what you know.”  

In his case, it is also how a lifetime of science keeps finding its way back to story.