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Western culture inherits a certain ironic awe of creative individuals. Poets (in particular) are special, set apart, and close to the divine. Unfortunately, for Plato, they are also of little use, for as much as they are sporadically close to the gods, their practice misrepresents the nature of reality (e.g., in contrast to practiced philosophy and dialectic, which allows one to glimpse beyond the world of appear- ances); they also fail to educate the youth morally.

Regarding the latter, a poet is an emotional creature and truly only super- ficially knowledgeable of warfare, medicine, carpentry, etc., even though such topics might arise in their compositions; thus, if they are not experts or skilled with even these matters, how could they be consulted or trusted for matters so important and lofty as how one ought to behave or the nature of right and wrong?

What is hard to believe about still regarding the creative individ- ual as somehow "possessed" or "inspired" (which literally suggests a vessel being "breathed into," in-|-spire) is that it is based on an ancient argument that sought to privilege philosophers over poets (and rhapsodes) as authorities in the Greek world, especially in regards to a general theory of knowledge and the good (see also Plato's The republic).

Without such an ontological or epis- temological commitment, modern creativity researchers should not be so beholden to this position. Indeed, from a modern research standpoint, studying the creative process given Plato's account would be extremely problematic anyway because the process is essentially regarded as irrational (or non-rule-based) and — more to the point — its source problematically external to the very individual in the throes of creation.

Interestingly, much of the Ancient Greek world did not hold such a "passive" view of poets; there was a comfortable overdetermination of causation in which a poem was both divine and consciously composed (see Murray, 1981).

Muses did not absolve responsibility; they were www.f rontiersin .org July 2014 I Volume 5 | Article 835 I 1 Ramey and Chrysikou Psychopathology and creative thought the personification of inspiration, which was the purposefiil use and appeal by the poet to perfectly ordinary cognitive processes like memory and knowledge, as well as processes that assisted in meeting the needs of an audience (e.g., fluency in composi- tion or performance).

There was a respectful balance between what modern researchers can regard as non-conscious productive processes and those deliberate, more controlled processes. The his- torical and cultural link between psychopathology and creativity is fascinating, but it was never a necessary one for either layper- son or scientist.

It is worthwhile to consider how research on creativity (at least with respect to its relation to psychopathol- ogy) would be different had views on "possession" been more moderate. THE QUANTITY OF CREATIVE PRODUCTION AND THE THIRD VARIABLE PROBLEM Perhaps because of the persistent (though problematic) link between psychopathology and creativity described above, the more recent empirical one has been easier to establish and accept — this, despite small sample sizes, lack of generalizabUity, lack of statistical significance, lack of proper control