I have thought that this may
I have thought that this may be the case, despite onlookers thinking we have lost our marbles.
As has been noted; we have 200,000+ nerve endings in our feet, most of the time they are switched off by the shoes we are wearing.
With the shoes off, those nerve endings must be going to the brain giving all the information of the temperature, texture and hardness of the surface, this in turn gets converted to knee bend, cadence and stride.
All that along with the extra visual information that must be processed to make sure you don't step on a stone of a piece of glass. Maybe we are using part of the 80% of the human brain that is underused
What we need to do is measure our heads before we start barefoot running and a year after to see how much bigger our heads are ;-))
Neil