It’s both inborn and learned. (Like a musical ear: you get what you get, but you can make it better if you work at it). A bird’s eye view is the way to do it, there was an interesting bit on Radiolab recently about languages that rely on dead reckoning, and people keep track of it with a bird’s eye map in their heads. If you can figure it out with pencil and paper, do that often. Eventually you will be able to do it without the pencil and paper. If you aren’t generally good at mental representations of spatial or visual things, it will take longer.
It’s both inborn and learned. (Like a musical ear: you get what you get, but you can make it better if you work at it). A bird’s eye view is the way to do it, there was an interesting bit on Radiolab recently about languages that rely on dead reckoning, and people keep track of it with a bird’s eye map in their heads. If you can figure it out with pencil and paper, do that often. Eventually you will be able to do it without the pencil and paper. If you aren’t generally good at mental representations of spatial or visual things, it will take longer.