Very interesting, as I am nearly the opposite. Bad spatial reasoning though pretty good at most other things. In school, geometry was fun and interesting - I enjoyed proofs. And I majored in English in college with a CS minor, so I think there must be a variety of in-roads for programming.

I think one "verbal" skill that has served me well is fast reading. When I had to read a 300 page novel once a week you learn how to skim for key elements, which is immensively useful for getting up to speed in a new codebase/language or locating a bug.