Does one observe chiral symmetry restoration in baryon spectrum?

It has recently been suggested that the parity doublet structure seen in the spectrum of highly excited baryons may be due to effective chiral symmetry restoration for these states. We review the recent developments in this field. We demonstrate with a simple quantum-mechanical example that it is a very natural property of quantum systems that a symmetry breaking effect which is important for the low-lying spectrum of the system, can become unimportant for the highly-lying states; the highly lying states reveal a multiplet structure of nearly degenerate states. Using the well established concepts of quark-hadron duality, asymptotic freedom in QCD and validity of the operator product expansion in QCD we show that the spectral densities obtained with the local currents that are connected to each other via chiral transformations, very high in the spectrum must coincide. Hence effects of spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry in QCD vacuum that are crucially important for the low-lying spectra, become irrelevant for the highly-lying states. Then to the extent that identifiable hadronic resonances still exist in the continuum spectrum at high excitations this implies that the highly excited hadrons must fall into multiplets associated with the representations of the chiral group. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case for meson spectra in the large $N_c$ limit. All possible parity-chiral multiplets are classified for baryons and it is demonstrated that the existing data on highly excited $N$ and $\Delta$ states at masses of 2 GeV and higher is consistent with approximate chiral symmetry restoration. However new experimental studies are needed to achieve any definitive conclusions.