Though I haven't endured the "spinning" as described in the OP, I do appreciate how the "shape" of text promotes or inhibits comprehending it.
While programming in C isn't especially difficult for me, writing/reading Scheme is far more satisfying and significantly easier to accomplish. It's certainly true that the visual "shape" of code contributes crucially to grasping what the code is supposed to be doing. But that makes sense for strongly visual learners for whom text is initially an abstract visual form. Extracting the verbal (auditory) meaning is effortful and possibly only partially successful.
Logically we'd expect such fundamental differences to underlie programmers' language preferences. I don't know, but it seems most programmers don't/can't see Lisp/Scheme code as visual shape, regarding it as a non-linear tangle populated by endless parentheses. The connections among brain-related factors and programming proficiency deserve greater scrutiny.
