Lack of Sleep causes Dragging of your Legs while Walking

The new study done by researchers at MIT and the University of São Paulo in Brazil, reports that walking  can indeed be affected by lack of sleep. The experiment was conducted by the researchers by taking the sample of student volunteers and the result showed that the less sleep students got, the less control they had when walking during a treadmill test. For students who pulled an all-nighter before the test, this gait control plummeted even further and for those who didn’t stay up all night before the test, those who slept in on weekends performed better than those who didn’t. 

Forner-Cordero along with Krebs and his associates have published the study in the journal Scientific Reports. Previously, the act of walking was seen as an entirely automatic process, involving very little conscious, cognitive control. Animal experiments with a treadmill suggested that walking appeared to be an automatic process, governed mainly by reflexive, spinal activity, rather than more cognitive processes involving the brain.