Similar experience to yours: recall experienced as a series (fabric?) of facts which tend to be more accurate than my peers, able to describe spatial relationships and manipulate/rotate them; also voracious reader growing up.

If using GPS prefer “North Up” mode which puts all the geometry I experience into a map quite easy to play back later and navigate as-yet-unseen roads in the vicinity of, by projecting/inferring where I am relatively. I don’t “see” the map, I just “know” where everything is relative to everything else.

Unable to actively “picture” myself on a beach, always thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor, yet able to render spatial facts into architectural sketches, or even tell you where on a page a fact was from a text book, and how deep into the book.

I like your term “text optimized”. I’m baffled by the YouTube visual/spoken learning culture — it feels so slow and tedious compared to reading the same knowledge.

This keeps coming up on HN, and I’m struck by similarities in things some self-reported “non visual recall” people are also “extremely good” at relative to norm.

I get the sense researchers are running into lesser-abled, while there may be a cohort who are /differently/ abled, for instance with some almost savant memory abilities instead of the visual recall.