I'm wondering whether work with 3D modeling software can improve that. I used to play a lot with Blender when I was young and my brain has clearly installed some sort of graphics engine as a result. I can easily imagine specific perspectives in my room, rotate objects in ~10 degree steps and tweak the point of view. It's surprisingly difficult to translate objects by a small amount though. It also takes a while until I get the colors right, and they are just superimposed on the eigengrau and fade quickly. Colors work very well with specific objects, for example a Red Bull can or an apple.
Interestingly, I'm pretty good at mental rotations, thinking of complex shapes, etc though I don't actually "see" the objects in my "minds-eye". They still remain abstract concepts.
The only analogy I can draw is this:
Imagine these "concepts" in your head:
Recursion
Monad
Quantitative Easing
They don't particularly have an "image" associated with them. I can think of "recursion" as an idea and have a mental understanding of the concept, yet I don't see it as a picture (I assume that most people don't actually see it as a picture, but perhaps they do).
Now, when I think of things like:
A Dog
Flower
Sunset
I still think of them as abstract concepts. Like the activations in my mind when thinking of "recursion" are of the same kind as when I think of "flower". If I really focus strongly on thinking of a dog, I get a really fuzzy "flash" of a visualization of a dog, but it's in no way "image-like". When I do this I can feel my brain really really working hard and it's mentally tiring.
Understandably, it's hard to express the internal mental life in words :)
Interesting. I think about recursion both in terms of linguistic/symbolic rules that are associated with it, but I also associate it visually with call tree diagrams, nested structures and loops. I can't think about dogs, flowers and sunsets just in terms of language though, there are always images, smells, sounds, movements etc. associated with it.
Perhaps take an empty piece of paper and imagine drawing a big letter on it. I've read before that non-visual thinkers can experience visual thinking that way.
