I found it very interesting that Terence Tao also did not like doing mental visualizations and preferred non-visual analytic methods (page 225). This strongly matches my own experience. I am also not a fan of doing visualizations in my head. I was once asked to do a visual test that’s similar to tower of Hanoi, and I just can’t do it visually, even though I have studied this problem when learning recursion and could formulate a solution easily analytically.