I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.
Another article that touches on this in a different way is temple grandin's paper on how animals think
I have no mind's eye, and I definitely consider it an advantage. I genuinely thought it was a euphemism until I was about 20, drunk, and surrounded by friends at college, playing a game in the student bar and the "mind's eye" thing came up. They couldn't believe I was serious. I couldn't believe they were serious... For a while at least.
My mind works on rules, not imagery. If I am asked to "not think of an elephant in a room", I (of course) immediately think of an elephant in a room, but it's not a visual picture - it's relationships between room and elephant (does it touch the walls, the space around it, does it press the light-switch on, can the door open if it opens inwards, ...) It's the concept of an elephant in a room. There's no visual.
Similarly, I don't know my right from my left - instead I have a rule in my head that I run through virtually instantaneously "I write with my right". That then distinguishes for me which is which. If someone gives me directions "first right, second left, right by the pub and next right" I run through that rule for the first instance, and then I have the concept of "not-right" for the "second left" bit. It gets "cached" for a while, and then drops out.
So where's the advantage ? I can consciously build these rules up into complicated (well, more complicated than people expect) structures of relationships and "work them". It's not like running an orrery backwards and forwards, but it's the best analogy I can give. I can see boundary conditions and faults well before others do - and often several complex states away from the starting conditions. I'm often called into meetings just to "run this by you" because I can see issues further down the line than most. I'm still subject to garbage-in-garbage-out, but it's still something of a super-power.
I'm told I sort of gaze into the middle distance, and then I blink, come back, and say something like "the fromble will interact with the gizmo if the grabbet conflicts with the womble during second-stage init when the moon is waning". Someone goes off and writes a test and almost all the time (hey, I'm human) I'm correct. Mental modelling is what I gain from a lack of visualisation. I think of it as literally building castles in the sky, except the sky isn't spatial, it's relational.
While I'm not sure this is directly related, but even things like being a participant in a multi-party conversation and watching 2 people have a discussion and instantly pick up on the fact that person 1 interpreted something in a certain way that doesn't match up with person 2's interpretation of it. Super handy being able to instantly just jump in and say "by the way I think person 1's understood that to mean this instead of that".
