As a person without much of a visual element to my thoughts, and with a pretty good natural sense of direction, I plan my routes by imaging/"feeling" the turns I will make.

Spatial reasoning is one of my strong suits, and I've been called neurotypical. For me, it's more like I automatically build up a rough map in my head as I travel. Or if I see a printed map, it's like I take a blurry snapshot (definitely not eidetic) that I can follow later if I make a little effort to remember it.

It's not exactly that I imagine flying over the landscape, but more that the mental map is a standalone structure. I can easily rotate it in 3D space, zoom in or out on a spot, or place myself anywhere relative to it. The level of detail depends how much time and effort went into the mapping.

My partner has very little sense of direction in most places. She has mild ASD, can't make a mental map at all, and mostly goes by landmarks I think.

I played with a lot of Legos and Transformers toys as a kid, and had fun playing Descent 2 as a young teen, so all that probably contributed for me.

I can do this in fictional videogame worlds but I can't navigate my own home county without Google maps lmao.

(Not diagnosed with anything but I have my suspicions, so ig take that fwiw)

I plan my routes by looking at a map and tracing my finger on it. In the rare times I'm not using google maps

https://aeon.co/essays/historys-shaming-fascination-for-the-so-called-idiot-savant

Co...morbidity?