I found this impossible throughout my childhood. One day it was suddenly easy.<p>I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down 3&#x2F;4-view RPG video games. There&#x27;s something about having an avatar that has a directional &quot;facing&quot; on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a direction button both <i>moves</i> it and <i>turns it to face</i> the same direction—which seems like it acted to train my brain to reflexively use this &quot;model&quot; whenever trying to figure out a directional visualization. I&#x27;d picture myself in the third person, give myself an &quot;origin point&quot;, and then visualize where I&#x27;d be (in both movement and facing) before and after, relative to the origin.<p>(All this was without actually &#x27;picturing&#x27; anything, in the traditional sense. Imagine having the sensation of manipulating a ferromagnetic cube floating inside a strong electromagnetic flux. The cube interacts differently with the surrounding magnetic field depending on its 3D orientation—it&#x27;ll feel different when you&#x27;re trying to add yaw if the &quot;south&quot; side of the cube is the one facing you, vs. the &quot;east&quot; side or the &quot;bottom&quot; side. Now imagine that the cube is a feeling in your proprioceptive system, rather than in your hands. Now imagine that there is no cube, only the feeling.)<p>One interesting effect of this is that I&#x27;ve found that I now get &quot;acclimated&quot; to cities I live in, and begin to have a very strong sense of where <i>north</i> is in those cities—because, at first, I look at Google Maps on my phone a lot while navigating, and so my &quot;origin point&quot; becomes fixed to North, such that I begin to see the same sort of fixed-orientation RPG grid overlaid on the city, with streets running &quot;up-down&quot; instead of north-south and &quot;left-right&quot; instead of east-west. I will actually have an intuition of &quot;I&#x27;m facing up&quot; when I&#x27;m facing north.<p>On the other hand, when I&#x27;m in a city I <i>haven&#x27;t</i> acclimated to, <i>man</i> do I miss that sensation; I get <i>completely</i> lost.