This is a very odd statement and depicts the different ways human brain works. As a musician, I find playing (or thinking music in terms of) sheet music so much more intuitive than play by ear. It feels like the very reason people notate, write music is because anything written down is easier to think/play than anything listened.
I can intuit a lot of things about music and even visualize some of it, but eventually I hit limitations. What I learn through these intuitions still applies as my ability to mentally visualize or model the music begins to fail, though.
It's similar with vectors. Once you have the orchestral equivalent of vectors, there's no way I'm visualizing it and doing mental geometry. However, what I learned and the modelling I developed from the "casio keyboard playing jingles" equivalent of vectors is still useful and applicable.
I guess this is the point where playing by ear or mentally modelling things fails, and notation is far more helpful. Yet if a lot of us approach these complex works from the notation angle first, we might feel pretty lost and uncertain about what we're doing with it and why.
I can tell I'm not articulating this well, but I like the musical analogy and wanted to get that out.
