John, In addition to personal calibration, and agilely moving from misses to hits -- utilizing the "sitter"'s confirmation bias; cold reading also involves utilizing a collection of little-known statistical facts. You can find such facts in the relatively expensive Cold Reading literature. Such facts include things like: The first letter of male first names is most often a J, and the fist letter of a female first name is most often an M. Knowing this, you shouldn't wonder why John Edward sometimes says things like, "I'm getting a man's name beginning with a letter J." The more specific the description, the more likely it seems to the audience that he didn't just pull it out of thin air -- this is the "Representativeness Heuristic" at work. But he's just using a statistical fact to base it on. There are other types of facts Cold Readers use, such as: Elderly people are likely to have at least one non-working major appliance in their homes. Most people have scars on their knees from childhood. And so on. It's more like they're calibrating little known social norms of experience, than calibrating the individual.