[udev]

This reminds of Richard Feyman's observation how some people count visually while others do it by sound.

You might be one of those people that can do math purely symbolically, by parsing and manipulating expressions, a bit like regular language and you don't need your brain to build a mental image for the things you work with.

I am intuition-first kind of person, and let me tell you, intuition is not a crutch, it can do things where symbol manipulations would take orders of magnitude more effort.

It is actually possible to imagine and manipulate highly-complex, multi-dimensional things that don't have equivalents in nature.

Imagination is a muscle used a lot when thinking intuitively, some of us have it developed to a ridiculous degree.

[liorben-david]

I think that's a good way to look at it. I'm definitely on the symbolic side of things for my understanding. I study pure math and the 1 applied math course I had to take(Applied Complex Analysis) was a nightmare because I was doing math without a formal framework.

I will say though that not every topic can have a sensible visual model to it, and being able to acquire symbolic intuition is probably essentiall to go far in any field.