E–mail your request for a seminar or lecture engagement to speak [at] Cytowic.net and include sufficient detail about your institution.
Dr Cytowic speaks widely to academic, professional, and general audiences. Past listeners include neuroscience departments, NASA, graduate writing students, the Smithsonian Institution, book clubs, and visual artists. Talks are highly illustrated with PowerPoint.

Upcoming Lectures

Aroma Science Forum. Fragrance Foundation Tokyo, Japan. Sept 3 2004

AIST Natl Inst. Adv. Industrial Sciences & Technology Osaka, Japan Sept 6

 

Aroma’s Implicit Gateway to Cognition

 

Japanese culture understands “synesthesia” as metaphoric whereas it hardly knows the perceptual phenomenon. Possible explanations include a cultural attitude of interrelated experience, Buddhism, and Nishida Kitaro’s type of phenomenal philosophy.

 Taste and smell account for only a small percentage of synesthesiae, but hold important clues. Aroma distinctively modifies emotions and behavior unconsciously and automatically. Neural networks explain how fragrance–activated multisensory perceptions and memories can subsequently inspire creative associations, metaphors, and verbal concepts.

The early engagement of limbic structures by olfaction (only three synapses removed from hippocampus instead of the usual five) stresses implicit processing, which is precisely what makes it a promising gateway to other cognitive domains.

 

UCLA Brain Research Institute. Wednesday February 5, 2003, 9 am – 4 pm

http://www.infocastinc.com/NBIC/nbic.asp

 

Contradictions to Conventions of Brain Organization

 

Synesthesia obviously contradicts many conventions, especially modularity, which organizes both cognition and neural tissue into self–contained subsystems whose restricted input–output is supposed to be uninfluenced by other modules. 

 This talk discusses similarities in sensory transformation, distributed schemes of neural organization, and the capacity for anomalous sensory binding that is latent in everyone’s brain. It offers suggestions to engineers who model networks on human biology.

 

Arte Città — University of Almeria, Spain July 25-28, 2005
A conference devoted to art and synesthesia. Multiple panel discussions.
artecitta.turincon.com/   info@artecitta.cc
Dr Cytowic talk is “Paradigm Shift: Hearing Colors in Your Brain”
    Hirshhorn Museum — Washington DC                                   visual-music
Visual Music     — Thursday July 14, 2005, 7-8 p.m.
In conjunction with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Dr. Cytowic gives a gallery talk about synesthesia in relation to the charged and profoundly generative relationship between art and music over the past 100 years. Abstraction and color meet musical forms as varied as classical, jazz, rock, and electronic. More information at the Smithsonian

Recent Lectures

Reboot Your Senses — New York  June 9, 2005
Colors, Perception, Games, and the Brain
Eyebeam Art & Technology Center 540 West 21 Street. In conjunction with the exhibit “What Color Does a Sound Make?”
Hannover, Germany —3rd International Synesthesia Conference
December 1-3, 2006 Keynote address, “Synesthesia: Current Knowledge and Future Research.”
Lectures