To repair the damage caused by the “quick fix”
No, there are some things that time alone cannot heal: you have to stick your finger in and make it hurt to make it better again. I learned this the hard way. A year and a half ago, as a happy new user of progressive glasses, I misstepped while walking down the sidewalk to cross the street and almost fell flat on my face. I wish I had fallen instead: I landed on my right leg and, as I now know, tore essentially all the tendons that attach the muscles at the back of the leg to the pelvis. I saw stars, had a huge bruise on my thigh, and my movements were limited. Getting up from a chair? Only very slowly. Running? No way.
A year later, thinking that time had solved the problem, I went for a quick run to take advantage of a green light... and my leg wouldn't move. The pain returned with such fury that I threw in the towel: I went to the orthopedist.
I learned a lesson about self-organization, one of my favorite topics. Tendon fibers regenerate quickly, yes—but if left to their own devices, they grow haphazardly, bunched up and disorganized. Like neurons in the brain, they only take shape and align themselves if used successfully: in this case, if repeatedly subjected to tension in the right direction, against the shortening of the associated muscles.
So off I went to physical therapy for the first time in my life. First lesson: learn to massage the deep tendons with my own weight on a tennis ball. This increases circulation in the tissue and prepares it for the second step: passive stretching, followed by lessons on... relearning how to use my leg.
The brain is to blame, in one of those examples of amendments that destroy the sonnet. With torn tendons, the muscles only find a frayed rope to pull on, and the crippled leg loses strength. The brain, clever as a Brazilian, quickly learns to use alternative routes: standing only on the good leg, using other combinations of muscles to walk, keeping the leg contracted in ways previously unthinkable to avoid further tension on the tendons. The result: the “workaround” begins to cause constant pain.
In fact, the physical therapist discovered that I was using several muscles to bring my leg back—except the right ones. The treatment? Retrain the brain. “Contract this muscle here,” she tells me with her finger stuck in my leg. I made several attempts, as if trying to raise just one eyebrow in front of the mirror, until I found the right path from my brain to the muscle. Having relearned the path, now it's time to put weight on the tendons until I regain strength. The quick fix is the devil...
Excerpt from Suzana Herculano-Houzel (2025) Neuroscience of Everyday Life, originally published in Folha de São Paulo in February 2018