[Sharlin]

1. It really depends on how you think. I assume that people with strong visualization abilities generally tend to use those abilities to reason and think about many different things, like math or code or filesystems or even, say, cooking. But other people use different "internal modalities" to reason about the same things.

As a photographer, one of the skills you develop is to have a concept of a photo in your mind before actually taking the picture. Likely this is the same for any visual form of art. Literally previsualizing what you want to express seems to be the most obvious way to think about it, but I assume there are also other ways that make more sense to less visually-oriented people.