Very cool, if true

Behind paywall, so handwavium here.

I have a mind picture of physical things, but it is not the same as a photograph or painting. Colour may or may not be there. There is a type of 3D-ness, but static. Glancing isn't enough - if I haven't noticed it on viewing, it is probably absent in my representation. I can sometimes read my class notes in my head. To create a grocery shopping list, I walk around the grocery store (okay: I float spookily around the empty grocery store).

However, since I have moved so many times in my life, I often know where I kept a thing three moves ago, but not now. Perfect internal image of the old location, but quite useless. By far the worst, though, is that if I have decided that I want a thing to be put away in a particular spot in the new place, that is where I expect it to be. It doesn't matter whether or not I have discovered the thing won't fit there. I have very firm mind pictures of the thing being in the perfect place, and no amount of it not being there will budge the image or provoke the memory of where I eventually actually put the thing.

I have always assumed that I can rotate shapes in my head because I learned to sew young. When cutting out pattern pieces, getting the best fit on the rectangle may involve laying pieces upside down and backwards and flipped. One has to keep track or nothing it going to work.

I often wonder how people who don't have internal representations cope. I suppose it's like google - now that we've got it, I would hate to do without it, but we did manage okay before we had it.