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Transcript for 1800 Seconds on Autism Episode on Monotropism

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Jamie Knight Thanks for downloading this episode of 800 seconds on autism. I'm Jamie Knight.

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Robin Steward And I'm Robin Steward. Welcome back to the podcast. And don't forget, you can find all our episodes on Â鶹ԼÅÄ sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get straight down to business. We know autistic people are great at focusing on small details. Some people call it obsessional. But we autistic people know the joy of it.

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Jamie Knight Today, we'll be chatting to Wenn Lawson, an autistic doctor, about how our minds focus differently to neurotypical ones, or, as it is known, wait for it... monotropism!

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Robin Steward And we'll be hearing some of your obsessions. By which I mean intense interests, too. I can't wait.

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Jamie Knight I've been very excited to talk to Dr. Lawson because I'm a huge fan of their work. He's an autistic psychologist, lecturer and author and one of the people to develop the theory about autistic focus known as monotropism. Currently, he is a tutor practitioner with Birmingham University online Master's in autism, but he lives in Australia. Howard, could you explain what monetary prism is and autism?

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Wenn Lawson It's a little bit harder to to multi task and do lots of things at once, which means walk around and have a cup of tea, chatting, processing information, thinking about what you might do later. Lots of things going on at once. We find that quite hard. So so we're better at doing one thing at a time. And we're also better at honing in on an interest that we've captured or our attention has captured. And staying with that interest quite passionately rather than having lots of interest. Having said that, if you are ADHD and autistic, you might find yourself with your fingers in lots of pies, which is a metaphor. That means doing lots of things. But generally serial fashion, one after the other, and then perhaps going back and finishing off first thing you started. So monotropism means being very single minded and focusing quite deeply and quite passionately on one thing at a time rather than on several things at once.

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Jamie Knight I think that's I think that's a really good answer for what is Monotropism.

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Robin Steward Wenn... how might monotropism look for an autistic person going about their day to day life?

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Wenn Lawson ÌýSo it might be through the windows of our personality. So it might be that we're just, oh, absolutely love cats or dogs or horses or reading or Lego or dinosaurs or whatever. And that takes over all of our attention. So there's nice spare attention for other things, noticing that we might need to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, all sorts of things. Even knowing when we feel unwell, we might not recognise the signals that our body is getting us so easily. We recognise them eventually, but we might not recognise them easily or interpret them if all of our attention is focussed elsewhere. It makes it hard to shift attention fast to move from one thing to another so somebody might come in and say Dinner's ready and you know, I'm in the middle of doing something on my computer and I've got to stop. I need a few moments or a bit longer than a few moments to switch from one thing to the next. I don't easily shift attention, so in daily life, that has quite an impact.

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Jamie Knight So Wenn you've completely changed my life in the last two years in the most positive way imaginable.

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Wenn Lawson Oh, that's good.

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Jamie Knight ÌýYou and I and your... and your work. So everything you're talking about now, I'm. I'm recognising big time. So basically I found myself lying on my back 23 hours a day in bed. And I thought that if someone had asked me beforehand, "hey, Jamie, you're going to have to lie on your back for 23 hours a day". How's that going to go for you? I would have said I would be terrible. I'd get bored and terrible and it'd be awful. Instead, I started to thrive in a way that I've not thrived before. And essentially what had happened is I'd gone from a life where I'd have five or six concurrent tasks to a life with just one one task at a time. I'd got an ability to get really monotropic, and I'm suddenly more productive and effective than ever. My focus was all about getting back on a bike so I spoke to basically every adaptive cycling place in the country and I got really, really passionate about this focus of getting back on my bike. So yay, for intense interests. But funnily enough, for me, the the way that Monotropism has affected my life the most is, is in how I think about myself and how I think about my time and how I use it. And I've started doing this thing that we call tunnels, not tasks. So the basic idea is that most folks focus around like tasks and time. So do this at said time or this by certain time. My way of kind of working through things is all around flowing, getting into what we call these like, long, flowy attention tunnels. And that's kind of how I've been reorganising my life around. So for example, when I get started at the start of the day, I don't have a to do list anymore. I've actually kind of rejected the idea of being organised in a traditional sense because it didn't do anything for me, it just made me really stressed. So instead I kind of get up and I focus my day on how to get in and out of tunnels. So I get into my first tunnel of the day, maybe at my desk and I get some stuff done there. And as soon as I got the momentum in the flow and I've got all the speed, my brain will work out what thing I need to do. I don't actually need to wake up with a specific list of things. And OMG I've got I've got lots and lots and lots of notes here, but it's been one of the highlights of the last few years. And one of the best things to come out of my injury. So thank you.

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Wenn Lawson I know it's exciting. And your definition or the way you're expressing that because we certainly use that term as well about being tunnelled and you'rebsolutely right about lists. Well, at least for me, it just increases my stress. I say, oh dear, this is overwhelming. Whereas if I get into what I'm focusing on, that can easily shift me forward to the next thing. It's like that train keeps us on track and it takes us eventually onto that journey wherever we're going. And I get quite excited about it, actually. Absolutely.

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Jamie Knight ÌýIt's just been such a useful lens. I've got so many other examples as well. Once I started viewing my life through this lens, I've been able to do that engineering thing of, you know, recognising a barrier, working at the assumption that led to that barrier and then and then iterating on the assumption and the barrier to to try and make it go away. So when I cannot express how much of a difference this has made.

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Wenn Lawson It's also important to recognise that you've been able to craft and shape this understanding to work for you and that somebody else, you know, might need to do it in a different way. But it doesn't matter. It's the same understanding and how we apply it to our lives is absolutely dependent on who we ask people, what we're doing, what we're into and so on. It's very exciting.

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Jamie Knight One of the best parts of autistic life and monotropism is our intense interests. Throughout this series, we've been asking you about yours, and you've been sending us audio, which is brilliant. So here's one of the audio bites that we had from a listener called Lauren.

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Lauren My intense interests tend to change every few years. As a child, it was WWE Wrestling and Liverpool Football Club at different times. In my teens, it was different stand up comedians. But now they tend to centre around a band or solo artist. Unfortunately, you can't really pick what your intense interest is going to be about. So sadly, all of the intense interest I've had around bands and solo artists haven't been musicians that you would probably consider cool. So since the start of lockdown, all I really read about, spoke about and listened to for a very long time has been the Bee Gees. For those of you who don't know, Bee Gees were a band from the sixties, peaked in the seventies with disco music and yeah, they're considered to be maybe a bit cheesy by some people. And the Bee Gees have such a long and varied career. A fascinating to read about. I know so much about them. It's actually a bit embarrassing and people genuinely think I'm being ironic when I say that I am like the Bee Gees and boom fan. No, I mean, I'm genuine about this. It's really funny.

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Robin Steward Thank you so much. That was really interesting. I also think that, you know, music is music and it shouldn't be. Oh, that's cool. Or that's not cool because it's whatever speaks to you.

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Jamie Knight Yeah, lots and lots. Bee Gees, Bee Gees are cool. And yeah, what we've been said about music is music. It's whatever speaks to you, whatever feels great. Thank you for sending that in. You know, it was great to hear how intense interest played a role in your life.

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Robin Steward I think producer Drew has a question.

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Drew I wanted to see Robin because I'm sat here and while reading up on this, I came in totally blind. I sort of could see a lot of the ways that. It might apply to me, especially as someone who is autistic and ADHD. But I wondered, Robin, if you're relating to a lot of what Jamie says and if this applies to you as well. Obviously, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one of us.

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Robin Steward Well, you might be interested to know that I have an ADHD diagnosis now.

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Jamie Knight Oh, congratulations.

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Robin Steward ÌýThanks. I've joined the club. I just wanted to add about obviously, everybody is different. We all know that. But the way that I get around the like, the thing that I need to do is too short for me to go off and do something else, because I often do go and do something else and get lost in it. Like making toast or something, because sometimes that might happen, you know, in another situation, like having to wait for the doctor or having to wait in the queue. And the way I get round those things is by listening to music or a podcast. I also find sometimes that you get books that have like challenges, like drawing challenges, you know, like draw something on this elephant's back. Not that I'm suggesting that you should put things on elephants back, but obviously it's just a drawn elephant. It's not real.

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Jamie Knight I'd like to note if you're at the zoo, please do not spray paint the elephants. You don't want any spray painted pachyderms.

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Robin Steward Yeah. Or something that I can do that I don't really have to pay attention to. You know, if I know I'm waiting for toast and I've got the news on just to keep me occupied. Now, I'm probably not that interested in the news. I mean, the news is interesting, but I mean, yeah, I mean, the news is like a rolling thing.

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Jamie Knight So I do something similar. I think the timescales for us might be different, and that's part of how we're different with how, you know, monotropism and how it expresses for us is that I need minutes and minutes and minutes to transition between things. It's, it's I can't listen to the news for 30, 40 seconds. One thing that I, I have found is that there are certain video games or certain types of game which work very well for me as as infinite time fillers. So I have a thing called a Nintendo Switch console, and there's a game called Snow Runner, which I describe as Muddy Postman Pat. So you're just run around delivering things on a big muddy map. It's great. That's something that I can turn on and play at any point. So when we're off to the doctors or we're waiting for something to happen before we can do the next stage of something, I'll quite often play Snow Runner because it can fill 10 minutes or, you know, 3 hours. So, yeah, I like your strategy. Every time we chat Robin, I love that. I love the back and forth that we'll chat about a problem or a situation and you've always got a pocket full of strategies. It's great. It's wonderful.

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Robin Steward Thanks. Yeah. I have a similar thing with Snowrunner. I have a, I think it's called Desert Run on my phone, it's a game. It sounds similar although you don't deliver things you just kind of run around but I find that yeah, that is very helpful. And I know that sometimes parents really worry about screen time, but I think in those circumstances it can be quite helpful because it gives you something to focus on. Like if I'm not doing anything, I'll get bored very quickly. And I do. I mean, if I was really paying attention to the news, I would find it hard to then move my attention. I have to be careful not to get too engrossed, but I remember that being a thing that my parents helped me to learn how to do. I also wanted to add that lots of kids, but I think this could apply to adults as well. But lots of kids find unstructured social time when there's not a specific like, Oh, we're going to build a fool or we're going to do this, or we're going to do that. Very challenging and it costs a lot of energy.

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Jamie Knight So that's that's what I was going to say about energy in that being engrossed in things that to me that's what I'd call being in a tunnel.

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Robin Steward Yeah, obviously everybody is different, but thinking about monotropinism, mono... monotropism. Yeah, that, yeah. I think thinking about monotropism, how might teachers or employers use it to be able to help autistic people?

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Wenn Lawson Yeah, so, so important. Thanks, Robin. And this is why it's so important to know the student or your employee employee to understand how they tick. And this is why we need to listen to one another, because it's not one size fits all, as is Jamie and Robin, as you've both pointed out. So when you get to know the person that you're thinking of and you have in mind as to what we need to do for this person and how... we need to check, ask us what works for us if we can't explain it. And maybe we need a way to process that a little bit longer, work it out. Whether it's visually, whether it's actually hands on doing it, whether it's speaking, you know, because we're all so different. This thing about autistic people are visual learners. It;s rubbish, really. I mean, some are, a lot of us certainly aren't. And we need to know. We need to know one another. So for example, because I'm not a visual learner, I think in pictures, but not visually. So I have a different whole set of different systems, sensory systems contributing to better picture for me. Then if you gave me a map and said, t"his is the way to get around the school" or the warehouse or whatever it is, I wouldn't be been any good for me. I can't read maps, can't follow maps. But if you say, let's go around this together and we walk that distance and this is that place and this is yeah, this. And I might take pictures of it as we go or record it. I can look at later. That'll work really well for me. So it really is important to know the people that we're working with, supporting and doing these things for or with. Because as you said, Jamie and Robin, that we're all so different.

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Robin Steward Do you have any strategies or ideas of how a teacher or support member of staff might be able to not break someone's tunnel but be able to help them to transition to another task or give them information they might need?

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Wenn Lawson Yes. I actually think some of the traditional things that they use in the school classroom can be really quite useful. Things like and for some people, wouldn't work for me, but for some people like timers, countdowns, moving a slider from one colour to the next. That's when you move, this sort of thing can be really useful. Not giving warning, not letting somebody have time to transition is awful. And the other thing is that some autistic people need things written down beforehand, stuck on a desk in front of them or up on a whiteboard or somewhere where they can read or see or have access to what that means in whatever shape or form they need it to be. But I don't work like that. I can't, I don't cope with that. if somebody gives me stuff written beforehand, I get so wound up in trying to process and work out what they mean, by the time have come to actually, "I've got to do that". I've lost it. So. So it really is knowing the person what works for them. And if somebody isn't doing well with pen and paper, maybe they need a keyboard.

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Robin Steward So it's time to hear from another listener. Let's hear from Carla about how the things she intensely focuses on help her feel in control.

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Carla My special interests are art, plants, ancestors, mystics and mysticism, and bushcraft. Growing up in an environment filled with chaos and abuse. I found solace by creating my own places of order and beauty through imagining myself inside works of art as well as making my own. I began asking questions about meaning and creation quite young in an effort to make sense of life's hardships. This put me on a lifelong path of fascination with mystics and misfits and their various ways of making meaning of what can feel meaningless. My favourite thing about my special interests is how they have given me a sense of safety and control when my life can feel sometimes unsafe and out of my control. They've also allowed me to share insights and practices with others that I hope may have some tiny positive impact in the lives of individuals I encounter in my life and in my work.

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Robin Steward Well, that was very interesting. Thank you so much for writing in, Carla. Oh, well, speaking in.

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Jamie Knight Yeah, I love the phrase speaking in. And that was. That was really interesting. Yeah, I'm nodding along. And my intense interests have a similar way. There are things I can be lost into in a way that I can bring back, you know, a sense of control over my environment. And, you know, one of the things I've learned from the last couple of years, my injury. Well, if it's an injury or not, that's a different question. But it is my body changing on me is the thing that I grieved was my loss of control, not the not what happened to my body. And, you know, last summer, I did a whole bunch of new things in regards to being far more home alone, because I was really struggling with a sense of control over my life and over my home. So my mom, my flatmate, bless him, was was it was really tricky for both of us. And during that time, I completely got absorbed into my interests beyond more than I normally do, because it gave me that sense of control.

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Robin Steward So when how do intense interests fit into the way of thinking about Monotropism?

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Wenn Lawson Again, it's about attention. So everything that you guys have talked about is so relevant, and it's all about the same kind of thing, whether you're in a tunnel and that's a passion or whether it's a tunnel of things, that is the way you're going about your day. It's the aspect of your attention is being occupied by something that you are able to work with. And I'm a bit like Jamie I didn't talk til I was near five and I have lots of issues with language and just listening to everybody's conversation and the words that are being said. I can get so caught up with that that I'm not quite sure how to answer a question, for example. And it's not because I don't want to answer it. It's that those other words are still swimming around in my head and I'm still processing them. I need a bit longer to get there. So if this is a passionate interest, so for example, I'm absolutely passionate about birds, any kind of bird, really, a feather kind, preferably. Yeah. If I'm in the middle of a presentation, doing a talk, doing a piece of writing or whatever, and a bird flies over or around across the window in front of me, that will capture my attention. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, I will always notice the bird. I will recognise its song, the shape of the bird, how it's flying, what kind of bird it is, etc. It will take over everything. And that's just that's just that passionate thing that captures attention even above where else we might be focussed. And yeah, it can be really useful when it becomes, when it comes into... Like I got a friend here in Warrnambool where I live in Australia who is really great at car detailing. So if you give your car to this person it'll be absolutely spotless and perfect and brilliant because that is his passion. It wouldn't be mine, but that's where he operates. So that's what captures his attention. That's what becomes his job. That's what he's really good at. And I'm not I don't want a job as a bird watcher, as as a paid interest. But certainly in research, I'm finding a whole heap of things that my passion for research and autism is certainly captured by. And I'm also synaesthetic. So that means I, some of it's hard to explain. But for me it means that my feelings states are actually colours, so feeling happy is like a yellow snow storm. It's not necessarily in a feeling that most people might have. A feeling states for me are colours and certainly in my head thinking in rhyme all the time, especially when I'm anxious. Those two things get me into that flow state where I'm, when I'm involved with research and can actually aid the work that I'm doing. It's hard to explain it, but this is the sort of tunnel that I get into. Sorry, different to Jamie but it's the same thing. Same principle.

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Robin Steward How did you and Dinah Murray start thinking about monotropism?

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Wenn Lawson From from Dinah’s point of view. She was doing a thesis for her Ph.D. and she was talking about language. It was a linguistics Ph.D., and she noted about how language breaks into the interests. When people talk, they capture another person's attention by talking, and that breaks into an interest. And she noticed when she came across working with autistic people, she was a carer. She noticed that it was very different for autistic people and she realised, oh, there's that one interest for this group of people, which is completely all consuming. And for this other group they flipped between interests. That's putting it very simply and that's probably not the whole story. But whilst Dinah was coming across those sorts of things in the UK, I was actually noticing exactly the same thing in Australia and I started to talk to other people about what I was noticing and what I was experiencing as an autistic person. And I couldn't find, I couldn't find a receptor, I couldn't find anybody to really understand what I was talking about. So I just worked it all out, put it into a book and into papers and shared with a lot of people. And over time, this whole idea of tunnels have of being on a railway track and not a road not able to switch easily from track to track. That's that's really taken off. And, and currently I'm certainly involved with about three projects we're exploring to scientifically substantiate that monotropism is happening in autism. Some people talk about neurodiversity, we're all neurodiverse every human on the planet is neurodiverse some of us are neurodivergent as in media, we sort of diverge from the typical, if you like. And I'm thankful because I think that we're the creative lot, we're the people who come up with ideas and can run with them because of that flow state thing.

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Jamie Knight We lost Dinah last year. She died and funnily enough, her funeral was one of the things that really made me go and look at her work again and shaped so many of my current thoughts. You and Dinah have changed my life in more ways than I can express.

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Robin Steward I just want to say thanks so much when you've been on our podcast and thank you for all the work that you've been doing. And just as Jamie was saying, you know, big love to Dinah because, you know, she really was a pioneer in helping people to understand how autistic people think. So thank you to both of you and thank you again for being on the podcast.

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Wenn Lawson Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity. And it's a work that continues on and there will be other people like you guys coming up in the ranks that will take it even further as we all get older and our lives come to a close. So it's exciting knowing that it's actually going to continue. Dinah would be rapt. I rapt as an Australian expression. It just means she'd be feeling really good.

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Jamie Knight Wenn, as I said before, your work has changed my life in more ways than I can express on this. It's been an absolute pleasure to chat to you, especially as it's so late at night where you are. So is there any way that people could find you online to learn more about your work?

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Wenn Lawson Absolutely. There's the web page www.wennlawson.com. I have a YouTube channel so you type Wenn Lawson into YouTube you'll find me lots of little illustrations I've created and animations to explain various things. In my experience, those are probably the two better places. Yeah.

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Jamie Knight Fantastic. You also have lots of books as well.

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Wenn Lawson Yeah, there's few of those out there just writing, running a new one at the moment, but I won't get onto that because that would be another tunnel.

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Robin Steward Some of your books published under the name Wendy Lawson. And so if people are looking for them and if you type in Wenn, which is W.E.N.N, you don't get up all your books, I just for people to find out, I hope that's an okay thing to say Wenn.

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Wenn Lawson Yeah, absolutely Robyn, Wendy is very much part of Wenn that was all part of my journey. I was Wendy before I, before I recognised Wenn so that's all part of who I am and I appreciate you saying that because that makes resources a lot more available to people. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Lovely to chat with you all.

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Robin Steward That's it for this episode of 800 and seconds on autism. Thank you for letting us into your earphones.

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Jamie Knight And also thank you for all of the listeners who email us at stim@bbc.co.uk. We've only been able to include a few of you on each of these episodes, but we really do read every one. And don't forget, you can find all of our other episodes on Â鶹ԼÅÄ sounds for wherever you get your podcasts from.

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Robin Steward So for me, Robyn Steward.

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Jamie Knight And me Jamie Knight.

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Jamie and Robin BYE!

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