Post-migratory brain misorientation disease

Maeda and coworkers disclose a biologically plausible chemical reaction that is perturbed by the Earth's magnetic field. That birds perceive the field is uncontroversial (same for some fish, bees, and some others) - exactly how is a mystery. A lot of promising leads point to haematite accretions in the brain but Maeda (and others) think about free radicals generated by photochemical pigments. Whatever the mechanism, you have to presume, given the phylogenetic distribution of magnetoception (surely not "magnetoreception"), that the reactions are ubiquitous even if only the birds and the bees and the rest have figured out how to use them. Carrubba et al. (2006; doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2006.08.068) suggest humans may have it. Not sure that's compelling but, leaving science for anecdote, I remember feeling profoundly disjointed and geographically bamboozled for several months after migrating from the northern hemisphere to the southern. It happened only on sunny days and I have to wonder whether some unconscious process was struggling to come to terms with apparently mismatched sensory data from the eyes (sun on my left as I commuted south for work in the mornings) with a magnetosense telling me I was heading polewards (which all my life until then had meant northwards). At the time I put it down to the coriolis effect affecting the regular tides of pre-aggregated prions swirling around in the wide open spaces of my brain but this magnetoception idea is (infinitesimally) more scientific (yeah right). Discomfort caused by inability to process conflicting visual and magnetoceptive information would be analogous to the unmanageable mismatch between sight and equilibrioception that results in seasickness. Wow, did I just invent a new syndrome? Hope it gets named after me. Just got to wait for science to catch up now…