hello it may be easier to grasp if we understand that that a spirit can project themselves in any light they wish in any form they wish, they may wish to project themselves as a person but with a viper tongue hanging from their mouth or fangs indicating their lesser side whilst they were here but it depends what they are trying to get across and how they consider the best and quickest way of doing that.
A psychic is able to see images but not a spirit person, whereas a medium is able to see not only the symbol or image the spirit is projecting but the spirit themselves (but even then only what they wish to reveal of themselves), hence all mediums are psychics but not all psychics are mediums, we have to develop psychic ability on the way up and then mediumship plays off of that on a higher frequency or level which we learn to become attuned to as we rise higher through spiritual understanding and development and practice.
Spirit will know any associations and symbols pertinent to the medium through the nature of telepathy but exactly how that works I haven't figured out yet. I've noticed when working in a group that the more educated you are the more the spirit world have to work with, for example someone skilled with geography may be shown a map indicating the spirits origins, someone with knowledge of flags would be shown a corresponding flag, someone with no knowledge would struggle to get a birthplace but there are other ways, a flamenco dancer may represent Spain however the person may also be projecting they were a flamenco dancer and have never been to spain in their life! However, that person may have medical knowledge and be able to recognize different organs of the body hence the spirit may be able to project a kidney or the position of the kidney on the body, if there is no knowledge then you'd struggle to get what they passed with.
Hence we need to get a real good grounding in symbolism which is highly personal. Learning common dream symbolism is a great place to start, your guide will pick up your intentions but be clear with yourself so they can be. We are doing the same thing when learning the symbolism of the tarot, for example when a spirit is referring to career I'm shown a wand or they may just project a card in it's own right to get something across, if we don't know the card we won't understand the message, all we are doing when learning to read is eventually learning to read without the middle man, the cards themselves.
With regards names, finer details and highly personal messages clairaudiance has to be developed unless their name is lilly and they can show you a lilly and on that note flower symbolism is a common theme a lot of mediums use. Bit off topic sorry but you get my drift, I mostly hear a thought voice and get an inner knowing and they use symbology to back things up but once you get a strong enough connection it becomes possible to check your work is correct by asking them though it's easy to jump to conclusions sometimes
As for switching off I'm tickled, we wouldn't think of 'switching off' the people around us with a body and there's no reason why spirit would bother us by being around us in exactly the same manner, we simply turn our attention away from someone when we're involved in another activity like watching tv or sleeping, they are people.
