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of ideas" (p. 230). Many of the cre- ative arts may, thus, function as an accommodating outlet for such self-reflection. In fact, upon closer examination, it seems that in studies of both eminent and everyday creativity, the link between psychopathology and creativity is never one of extreme, incapacitating "madness" and creativity (see Richards and Kinney, 1990).

Rather, the link is between creativity and certain symp- toms (e.g., of hypomania) like focused motivation and drivenness to create or achieve some goal. In fact, 90% of the writers in Jamison (1989) indicated that such moods were either integral or at least very important to their work (see also Jamison etal., 1980).

These are states in which the non-pathological may also find themselves and be creative. An increase in the quantity of one's output positively affects the likelihood of generating those statistically rare acts and achievements identified and celebrated as creative.

Productivity, self-reflection, and elevated moods likely serve as reinforcers for such continued practice. What is critical, it seems, is a balance between unfettered productivity and a more controlled deliberation and evaluation of the volume of produced material.

Modern research in the cognitive and brain sciences, with no overt ties to Plato, offers an account of creativity under just such a premise. NEURAL MECHANISMS SUPPORTING CREATIVE THOUGHT AND THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY Recent neuroscience research has highlighted the potential contri- bution of both spontaneous and controlled processes to creative thought (Zabelina and Robinson, 2010).

Coming up with novel ideas or solutions necessitates the ability to generate unexpected associations, which fosters originality and uniqueness. Generating a creative product also requires the ability to evaluate the viabil- ity and efficacy of different available possibilities, as well as an uninterrupted focus on the creative task until its completion; this latter process is generally referred to as cognitive control.

Cog- nitive control underlies most aspects of higher-order cognition, from attention, language, and memory to decision-making and problem solving. This set of top-down, regulatory mechanisms is supported by the prefrontal cortex (PEC) and promotes the salience of certain bottom-up, sensory information from either the environment or the internal state of the organism toward Frontiers in Psychology | Psychopathology July 2014 I Volume 5 | Article 835 I 2 Ramey and Chrysikou Psychopathology and creative thought context-appropriate responses.

Likewise, access to bottom-up, sensory information that is deemed irrelevant for the task at hand is diminished or ehminated (Shimamura, 2000; Miller and Cohen, 2001). Although this process of regulatory filtering is undeniably beneficial for complex cognition, under certain circumstances exerting top-down influences might constrain or impede per- formance on tasks that benefit from spontaneous, bottom-up thought.

This tradeoff is captured by the matched filter hypothe- sis (MFH) for cognitive control (Chrysikou et al., 2013b), a recent theoretical proposal that highlights potential competing interac- tions between prefrontal and posterior or subcortical brain systems that determine the appropriate level of cognitive control filtering over bottom-up information for optimal task performance.

The MFH contends that PFC-mediated cognitive control is advanta- geous for explicit, rule-based tasks, involving the manipulation of information that does not exceed the