The Creativity Crisis

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

This is the link for the Newsweek article about creativity and teaching creativity.  It has some interesting things to say about what is happening in the brain when an artist (a musician in this case) is asked to do a creative task as opposed to a non-artist.  This goes to Sean's question of what changes when the act of making, and the maker, is put into an "art" context.  For those of us who are art teachers:

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.