Greetings Lewis A pleasure! You ask, "Is this calibration to the patient's conscious and unconscious responses and/or using your own conscious/unconscious to do the calibration?" In your capacity as a physician, your patient will, of course, offer information of utility both consciously and unconsciously. We suspect that you have adequate tools for handle the conscious productions of the patient - something like the Precision Model or the Verbal Package. The calibration of most interest from our point of view is the patient's unconscious responses - the example you offer is your conscious ability to calibrate the patient's "yes set". We will presume that you also consciously calibrate the "no set" which is at least as important in prompting you to present your information and requests for compliance in a different way. We will also presuppose that you are tailoring your verbal communication to the representational system indicated by the continuing shifts of preference offered by the patient's eye movements and predicates (among other cues). At present, if we understand appropriately, you have arranged for your own unconscious to detect and feed you information so detected. Unfortunately this has resulted in your being overwhelmed by the multitude of signals that your unconscious called your conscious attention to. There is a lovely arrangement that would relief you of the necessity of being consciously aware of the unconsciously detected signals on offer from the patient - that would be to skip the need for be conscious of the unconsciously detected signals and simply make an arrangement (for example, using something like the involuntary signal system described in Whispering) to have your unconscious direct your behavior based on what it has detected. In this way, you could skip the step of becoming conscious and then acting of the basis of what has been detected and simply act on the information detected. This last seems to be what you have already organized effectively - here we are referring to your statement, "I have my own "unconscious" signals which are kinaesthetic sensations of yes and no (chest and abdomen) that allow me to "intuit" the patients response in lieu of the more overt signals." We like very much your description of unconscious calibration - we are proposing simply that you drop the requirement to know consciously and liberate your unconscious to direct your behavior to take into account what has been detected. You ask, "So the crux of my question is, what particular methods do you suggest I, and anyone else reading this, use to fine tune our calibration skills?" We completely agree - a blind pilot is a dangerous individual. In your particular case, we are uncertain whether you are referring to refining your ability to calibrate unconsciouly or consciously. You have a well functioning unconscious calibration - so, one very powerful way to increase your conscious ability to calibrate is to have your unconscious direct your eyes and use head tilts to direct your hearing to mark for you consciously the signals that it is using to do its job. More specifically, you might make the arrangement with your unconscious to direct your auditory and visual receptors to only those signals emanating from the patient that carry the information you need as a physician to perform with an ever increasing refinement of your conscious appreciation of the patient's ongoing non-verbal dialogue. This would allow you refine your conscious calibration skills without being overwhelmed by too much information. More generally, there are well designed exercises and as mentioned in other threads on the website, if you have the luxury or simply make the commitment to spend time with people with sensory "impairments", then certainly a blind person will offer exquisite patterning for hearing and a deaf person quite refined and distinctive (distinct for hearing people) strategies for scanning visually. The most fundamental way to refine calibration is to simply practice with feedback. Also it is quite likely that there are co-workers (other doctors and nurses) who are more skilled at some of these calibrations and would serve as models to rapidly uptake finer distinctions. We also note in passing that you can deliberately change your visual scanning patterns (defocusing your eyes so as to put the movements of the patient in your peripheral vision) - or as we mentioned in Whispering, similar self manipulations in the auditory channel such as "listening off the top". When you have the time, we would enjoy your elaborating on your statement, " I also notice where they "project" their inner experiences in the space around them, using that location as subsequent feedback" All the best, John and Carmen