High Cognitive Minds

Most of our predictions are based on very linear thinking. That's why they most likely will be wrong. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems

One of the things that puzzles many gifted people about the non-gifted is their general inability to think in new ways, even at the personal, everyday level. Whether it's solving a problem that should be perfectly obvious, anticipating the future, or thinking about larger issues, the average person seems to lack the tools for thinking through a problem in any but the most stereotypical ways

Linear thinking limits responses to change, taking one step at a time, never looking to the side, where non-obvious relationships may exist, only straight ahead.  Linear is the view that progress is a series of logical steps from what's already known and understood. Unfortunately, the rule of nature seems to be that, while nature itself is not linear, most humans are linear thinkers.

Dean Keith Simonton and Jerome Kagan have both commented on this limitation.

"Humans do not easily perceive patterns when relationships are obscured by noise (or random exceptions). Even fairly substantial correlations between two variables can look chaotic to all but the most discerning eye." Simonton

"...the human mind has difficulty uniting ideas from two different lexicons and so conceptualizes them as separate forces." Kagan

Linear thinking is a kind of compartmentalization which almost guarantees a lack of creativity. Most intellectually gifted individuals have, to one degree or another, the capacity to unite ideas from seemingly unrelated areas, and to cut through noise to underlying patterns. One reason many gifted people aren't creative, in spite of their high intelligence, is that they are primarily linear thinkers. They're capable of absorbing vast amounts of information, but not necessarily of using it in new and innovative ways.

This is partly innate, but education normally reinforces a linear orientation and discourages lateral thinking (Edward de Bono's term) and contextual thinking. The intellectually gifted need an education which expands rather than diminishes their cognitive capacities and their creative potential. Since such an education is rare and not likely to be instituted any time soon, intellectually gifted adults are left with the task of educating themselves as best they can.

References:
Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: darwinian perspectives on creativity, Oxford University Press
Jerome Kagan, Unstable Ideas: temperament, cognition, and self, Harvard University Press