Some are visual thinkers but I am not.

I am a logical thinker and good at creating sensible (that is high-level or very granular dependent on importance) abstractions in my head. Once this is done, it's easy to think "this abstract data gets computed by this function which passes its output to this function, etc."

The actual solution will then appear from (0) the association of an (erroneous) result with a particular piece of data/behaviour, (1) strictly following through this model in my head, (2) a holistic understanding of the flow of data and the computational roles inside the system (or external to it in the case of end-users), or (3) a whim to subvert and reframe the question/problem in interesting ways. As Carl Jacob's said: "Invert, always invert."

Generally you progress from (0) to (2) before taking out a debugger. Most easy problems are solved at (0). (3) is unusual but intellectually gratifying if you find a way of solving a problem in a way that could not be understood simply through using a debugger and hacking a couple of lines of code.

Very. It's just how my mind puts things together, not something I can try to do or not do. I tend to see programs in blocks and patterns interacting rather than sequences of logical operations, probably why I tend to prefer the object-oriented paradigm over others. I get bogged down when I can't visualize the interactions. It isn't just programming, either -- working with derivative products in finance I formed very detailed visual mental models of how they operated.

Sometimes visual but more often I imagine the code physically. It has weight, or friction, or rigidity, depending on what aspects of the code I'm trying to think about.