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Ask a scientist and an artist to define creativity and you get two very different answers.

"Creativity is the ability to produce something both new and useful," said Rex Jung, a scientist conducting a study on creativity at the University of New Mexico's MIND Institute.

Danae Falliers, an artist who is helping Jung find research subjects, is less direct.

"What I've noticed is that creative thinkers and problem solvers tend to look at things as tangential pieces - and see connections between them," Falliers says. "They see things from a weblike approach. Others see things more linear, like A plus B equals C."

Despite their differences, Jung and Falliers describe themselves as creative under each other's definition as well as their own.

Finding the root of that creativity - or what creativity really is - is another story, one their study will try to reveal.

The John Templeton Foundation funded the research on creativity this month, with a $600,000 grant over a three-year period.

In the study, Jung will scan the brains of 50 UNM undergraduates and 50 visual artists to determine if there are any structural differences between those who are creative and those who are not, he said.

"We're taking a really detailed look at the brain both structurally and functionally," Jung said. "We want to see if parts of the brain are bigger or smaller, as associated with creativity. We want to see if the chemical underpinnings are related."

Of course, some of the UNM students may be creative and some of the visual artists may not, but that's part of the fun, Jung said.

"I believe we all have some creative capacity within us, and I hope we find some highly creative undergrads," Jung said.

Participants will take a series of tests and have their brains examined in a variety of states - such as while they're looking at cross hairs on a white piece of paper while they're doing reasoning tasks and while they're creating something.

The objective is to see if creativity can be encouraged in individuals who aren't particularly creative, and also to look for ways to fight some of the negative aspects of creativity - such as its connection to neurological conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

"We don't know if everyone is creative or only a select few," Jung said. "We don't know where in the brain creativity might be housed. And if we knew stuff like that, we might be able to create it or cultivate it."

Already, Jung's work on the brain and creativity has yielded some interesting results - such as that less gray matter in certain regions of the brain might make a person more creative.

"Creativity may be increased in people with lower amounts of tissue in the temporal lobe than other parts of the brain," Jung said.

The lack of tissue could reduce a person's inhibitions, making it easier to see unusual connections between concepts and materials.

It also could indicate why children and older people seem to have bursts of creativity, Jung said.

"Children, we think of them as being creative, and then we beat it out of them - but in reality their brains aren't fully developed," Jung said. "Then we become adults, and things are stable for a while, but after age 40 our brains start to unravel again."

Why humans evolved creativity - and why some people are more creative than others - is not something we'll likely ever know, but Jung does have a theory.

"Greater than 90 percent of the time, the world is very predictable," Jung said. "But about 5 percent of the time things go haywire - like in Hurricane Katrina - and you have to come up with something really new in order to survive."

So certain humans evolved with some looseness in their brains to allow them to think their way around nonlinear situations, he said.

"But on the flip side, because the world is rather predictable, people like that can be annoying some of the time," he said with a laugh.

Of course, Falliers, as an artist, has her own idea about why creativity evolved in humans.

"I wonder if all nature doesn't evolve creatively," Falliers said. "That brings us to a spiritual question. I don't think creativity is just survival. I think if we don't expand and grow, we die. We see that in the universe - in the largest and the smallest thing."

Whatever answers turn up, this study is only the beginning, Jung said.

After this one is complete, he'd like to study creativity in other groups, including scientists, musicians and architects.

"I started with visual artists because I wanted to begin with a very circumscribed group," Jung said. "It's an easy place to start, but I think there are a lot of avenues for creativity."