[hmcdona1]

This going to sound out of left field, but I would venture to guess you have very high spatial reasoning skills. I operate much this same way and only recently connected these dots that that skill might be what my brain leans on so heavily while programming and debugging.

Pair programming is endlessly frustrating beyond just rubber duckying because I’m having to exit my mental model, communicate it to someone else, and then translate and relate their inputs back into my mental model which is not exactly rooted in language in my head.