For years I thought I was the only person with this condition. It’s exactly as described, with slight shifts in overall color “temperature” in each eye. I only notice this when looking at light colored backgrounds – off-white walls are the main culprit, but other light colors (pastels) will make it apparent.
When I addressed it with an ophthalmologist back around 1980, he got kind of exercised with me for not mentioning it sooner. Turns out it can have lots of causes – most of them benign (as mine is), but some of them requiring prompt attention.
The reason I’m commenting at all is to urge anyone with this anomaly to have it checked out as soon as possible. In my case it took two eye specialists and a neurologists to rule out some pretty hairy conditions and determine that congenital Anisocoria (different sized pupils) was the cause. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisocoria>
Not trying to be scary here. But unless you get it checked out, you’ll never know which of the many benign conditions is likely to be causing it. Good luck!
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, dawson54, we’re glad to have you here. For future ref, when one starts a thread, it’s helpful to other readers to provide a link to the column in question. Yes, it’s the front page column for this week, but in a few weeks, it will sink into the Archives. So the link saves search time, and helps keep us on the same page. No biggie, you’ll know for next time.
I’ve had this condition for decades, never thought much about it, and was surprised to learn that this is apparently not well-known or studied. Without knowing the mechanics, I thought maybe it was an artifact of the way the brain constructs a 3D representation of the world, kind of like the old-school 3D glasses with red and green lenses.
As others have mentioned, it’s hardly noticeable except when looking at a white or off-white surface. Referring to it as a sort of color-blindiness, as Cecil’s article did, seems a bit of an overstatement. As far as I can tell, I’m not blind to any particular color.
BTW, I’ve had a rther extensive suite of eye tests done within the past six months, with no color-perception issues noted.
Due to childhood strabismus, and many operations on my eyes, I have a very dominant right eye, while the left, although perfectly fine, is little used. As an example, the old 3D with two different color glasses gives me a headache after just a couple of minutes (plus the fact that I don’t see the 3D, just blurriness.
But on the matter of color, looking at objects normally (using the right eye) colors seem “normal”. But closing the right eye and looking only through the left, colors appear perhaps 20% more vivid, not different, just the same color in hi-def.
Maybe the condition described has something to do with with eye dominance.
Yes, me too, and I think we have had SDMB threads on this before where it turned out that pretty much everyone has it, even if some people had never actually noticed before. (I have had cataract surgery in both eyes, which may have made a difference, but I am pretty sure there was a difference between the eyes even before that.)
The difference for me, though, and I think for most people, although definitely there, is quite subtle: as dawson54 says, a slight difference in color temperature. I think ophthalmologists are only going to start to worry if the difference is very large.
Another voice chiming in with “always had it, never worried about it.” However, it is/was only noticeable if I am lying down in very bright light - sunbathing poolside or at the beach, in other words. I always thought it had something to do with the bright light shining into one eye more than the other.
At the moment I have very distinct differences in color vision in both eyes, but that’s because I’ve had a cataract removed from one eye but have not yet had surgery on the other and can’t for another 3 months or so. Once both eyes are cataract-free, I’ll analyze the color effect again.
Same, like it’s as if the WB is off on one eye or the other. I always assumed it was normal due to the organic nature of our being and the fact that despite how symmetrical we are, there are ever so slight differences.
Really, what we need to do is look at the eyes of corpses and count the rods and cones and map their layout. See if it is precisely the same and if not, to what magnitude not.
whc.03grady’s post notwithstanding, there is no reason to think that this color-perception difference between the eyes is in any way related to blood pressure.
My assumption has always been that people only notice this because they close one eye for a little bit in the sun, causing their closed eye to get slightly desensitized to red (since that’s what they’re seeing through their eyelids). Everything after that is just a ripple effect from that initial bit.
It would be interesting to keep track of which eye seems bluer vs. redder, as well as which eye was closed first.
It may be worth pointing out that the proportion of L-cones (“red sensitive”) to M-cones (blue sensitive”) in the human eye, as well as the pattern of arrangement of these cones, varies quite a lot between individuals (Roorda & Williams, 1999 [PDF]). (The “blue sensitive” S-cones are more regular both in numbers and arrangement.) Apart from the fact that they are concentrated almost entirely within the fovea and parafovea, the arrangement of the L and M cones appears to be random, except that there is some degree of clumping by type, that may also vary between individuals. I am not aware of any studies of differences, in these regards, between the two eyes in the same individual, but it seems very likely, given what we do know, that they often exist. Thus one eye might have more L than M cones and the other might have more M than L, and, even if the proportions are the same, the cones might be arranged differently (more clumped ,or less) between the two eyes. Although these differences do not seem to give rise to any apparent differences in people’s abilities to discriminate colors (none of the people studied in the cited article were color blind), it does seem possible that differences of this kind (especially in the L to M proportion) between the two eyes in the same person might give rise to the sort of effect we are talking about.It may be worth pointing out that the
I do not think so. I can see the effect indoors under not very bright lighting conditions, and certainly when the light is not nearly bright enough to cause me to see red through my closed eyelid. In any case, people rarely spontaneously wink. Normally, if we are not making a special effort to do one at a time, both eyes close and open together.
Actually, though, I think the difference between my eyes is consistent (although I have not kept records, so I may be misremembering). I think my left eye (which is my dominant one) consistently has always given me slightly warmer tones than my right.
I can remember as a child asking my father why I saw differently from each eye. I thought it was normal too, and was surprised that he said it wasn’t. He thought maybe it was colour-blindness, but it definitely isn’t. I haven’t actually thought about it for decades and now I don’t seem to be able to reproduce it - maybe my eyes grew out of it?
So, why do people ever notice the difference in their eye color temperatures? Because they’re doing things to make it apparent, obviously. Rubbing one eye for a bit, perhaps, or having looked through one eye for a while at something, and then opening the other eye.
The user name is a Zork reference (I only originally registered this account as a joke) but as a transgender person the qualia aspect is not lost on me.
Nonsense. I can see the difference now, now simply by closing one eye and then opening it and closing the other. I was not doing anything different with either eye beforehand.
I should have been a bit more clear that I’m not suggesting that EVERYONE who has different color vision in each eye has it for that reason, just wondering if a lot of people who notice this only notice it sometimes are really seeing a perceptual effect akin to the color fatigue one experiences while wearing red-blue 3D glasses.
But, quick question: is it consistent regardless of which eye you close first? (with a nontrivial amount of time between each test, I mean)
