The Operation Ouch! episode ‘How to Train a Brain’ which aired on Wednesday 3 March 2021 saw Dr Xand van Tulleken investigate the differences between human and animal babies.
Operation Ouch! is a comedy children’s television series shown on CBBC for children aged five and above. Doctors Chris, Xand and Ronx explore the ins and outs of the human body in a variety of eye-opening experiments.
Filmed in a socially distanced way on the Canterbury campus Dr Xand met ‘Evolution Expert’ Dr Sarah Johns in the Charles Darwin laboratory, to find out why human babies don’t spend as long inside their mums as other animals.
Sarah explained that because humans are bipedal, our pelvis has quite a narrow diameter. “So, what we wouldn’t want to have happen is the baby to develop too big a head, that then wouldn’t fit through the mother’s pelvis.”
Growing a baby is also energetically costly. At the stage that the baby can’t take enough energy from the mother that it needs, it’s born and then can use its mothers’ milk to grow and develop instead of using the mother’s resources from her body.
There may also be social benefits by being born at an earlier stage in comparison to other animals Dr Johns said.
In Series 9 Episode 9 the doctors also met a very special elephant calf, revealed how to train your brain and said hello to Ouch Patient Evie, who has a blood disease called aplastic anaemia.