How do you remember routes? If someone stops you on the street and asks for directions what exactly happens in your mind? It seems to me almost impossible to be able to navigate effectively without the power of visualisation, but it’s likely my own intuition is failing me here.
Sorry I don't have a great answer for this, but generally, just vibes.
I'm not great at articulating directions to people due to the lack of visualization, and if someone asks me if I know where the x on y road is, I can't ever imagine it, but my general spatial orientation is totally fine and I can pretty competently navigate in both urban and wilderness spaces.
There's like a abstract idea of where I am in relation to other things at any given point, but I don't really know street names or things like that because they're just not that helpful for my ability to get around.
It's strange that I find it so difficult to explain—our brains are just good at compensating for shortcomings I suppose!
It's really hard to describe, and in my experience, people with mental images tend to have a hard time imagining it (and people with aphantasia seem to differ on how much they use an internal monologue, etc). In a nutshell, for me the directions either 'come out of nowhere' or there is a vague feeling of 'geometrical stuff happening somewhere in my brain, in a mostly non perceptible places'.
