Scientists in Germany reported Thursday that this often-described sense of lost-hiker déjà vu, of having inadvertently backtracked while wandering in the woods, is real. “People really do walk in circles,” said Jan L. Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/science/21circles.html