Color Difference between Left and Right Eyes?

[Yoshimagick]

Hello, I am new to Physics forums :)

Anyways, I have noticed that there is a very slight color difference (Hue) between my two eyes, unnoticeable when both are open.

I close my right eye, and looking with my left eye, I see that all the colors are slightly "warmer" (More intense, all the colors are tinted a bit with reds and yellows)

When I close my left eye and look with my right eye, I see that all the colors are slightly "cooler" (Less intense, all the colors look more gray, blue, and lighter)

This difference is more apparent under florescent light than in incandescent, have not tried under sunlight yet.

It is not the difference in angle that my eyes are viewing in, since I have moved my head slightly to test with my eyeballs in the same location.

Anyone experience anything similar? And know what this is called? (Or anyone feel like trying? I first did this at school where all the lights are florescent, it was more difficult to noticed the difference at home where nearly all my lights are incandescent.)

Only old topic I could find that was close to this was: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=60876

There were next to no replies however.

 

[danihel]

Claude Monet saw warmer on his cataract eye and probably saw ultraviolet on his eye after surgery. I think the more you keep doing this experiment the bigger the difference you might experience as the cones get worn differently

 

[lisab]

Hi Yoshimagick - yes, I definitely have this. I thought it was normal until I mentioned it to my optometrist during an exam, and he seemed baffled. He said some patients say they see contrast differently in each eye, but not color. So it seems it's not very common.

My dad is color blind (rather severely), my mother has normal color vision, and I'm female, btw.

Question for PF medicos: Is it possible that one eye was more affected by my father's colorblind gene?

 

[Ryan_m_b]

I've always had this and assumed it was normal. Perhaps I should mention this at my next opticians appointment!

 

[Yoshimagick]

Oh good, I'm not alone :D

 

[Evo]

I've noticed this for awhile. My left eye sees pale, washed out colors, my right sees everything tinged orange.

 

[DavidMcC]

Yoshimagick, I suspect that your eyes were not subjected to quite the same lighting in the days after your birth. The following reference explains a likely mechanism:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2007.04766.x/full

"Light exposure induces retinal photoreceptor degeneration and retinal remodeling in both the normal rat retina and in animal models of retinal degeneration."

We may not be rats, but our eye development differs only in such details as the cone types.

 

[DavidMcC]

... another possibility, similar to danihel's reply, might be that an over-bright laser beam was shone into one of you your eyes more than the other at some stage in your life, This could also cause a permanent asymmetry in your colour vision, by damaging some cone types more than others.

 

[Proton Soup]

i've been seeing everything a little brighter in the right eye since nearly coughing my head off with pneumonia a few years ago. i had my first visual auras then. color looks more vivid, but perhaps it is just the iris opens a little more on that side? my optometrist had no explanation. i suspect, but can't prove, there is some nerve damage or impingement on that side, as there is much more funkiness going on. fortunately, it's not nearly as bad as it once was.

 

[DavidMcC]

Proton Soup, the list of possible visual problems is very long indeed, and many of them are not directly related to the eye itself, but involve either the optic nerves or areas of the brain such as the visual cortex.

 

[DavidMcC]

As far as I can tell, the one region of the visual cortex that you can rule out as the location of a left-right visual asymmetry is the striate cortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striate_area" ,
because the damage would have to match the stripe pattern, and that is highly improbable.
However, you could well be right that it is the optic nerve in your case, because there might be severe non-uniformities in the asymmetry from other regions of the eye-brain system, except for flood illumination effects in the eyes.

 

[FtlIsAwesome]

I see things with a yellowish tint in one eye, and bluish in the other eye. At least, last time I checked. Hard to tell with the lighting in this room.
At first I thought it wasn't normal, but then the doctor said it was.

 

[claudioguirun]

Hi, Dear.
I have this problem. But I can easily see images 2D in 3D because each eye sees differently. This is very interesting because in some movies, photos and websites, it seems that I see in a 3D cinema.

 

[angga333]

a very interesting experience,,,

 

[The English P]

I noticed the same intermittent problem a few years ago.I had just swapped jobs ,from working Nightshifts to Dayshifts and just put it down to the change in light conditions.
I can't now,remember which eye was which or know if that is relevant.But it went away eventually.
I do however think that it should be worth more study.
Maybe in the diagnosis of symptoms of some depressive illnesses.
Because I'd be suffering with depression ,if I had that dull view of the world in both eyes.
Vice Versa,Maybe the happy successful people in this world ,see a bright vivid environment,full of amazing colours all the time.
Where you live ,subconsciously alters your state of mind.
The sunny days and rainy days of England for instance.

I should have stuck an eyepatch over the dull eye,at the time.Then maybe I'd have not turned into the science geek that I am today.
But If I had ,then I wouldn't have been here to answer this post.Or obtain the thought of wearing an eyepatch.
SORRY! different branch of Physic's...lol..

 

[epheph]

Yes, I have this. I have noticed it for my whole life, but always assumed it was normal until I casually mentioned it and the people I was with were baffled. I am yet to develop a hypothesis on the matter.

 

[Monique]

I noticed it once, but I cannot reproduce the effect. I think it was due to my eyes being exposed to different angles of light, which might have temporarily changed photoreceptor dynamics.

 

[onomatomanic]

I have this, too, just as several previous posters described. It's most obvious if I look at something that's a not-too-bright white, such as a piece of paper indirectly lit, and then close first one eye and then the other. The paper which looked neutrally white before looks faintly yellowish to the one eye and faintly bluish to the other.

In the right lighting conditions, it can also make the entire visual field look warmer and/or more vivid to the red-skewed eye and colder and/or slightly washed-out to the blue-skewed eye. I wonder which way 'round the causality works here - it could be that an eye actually perceiving more red than blue tricks the brain into thinking the colours are more vivid because red has the more vivid associations (alarm, blood, fire), or it could be that an eye perceiving more colour across the spectrum tricks the brain into tinging the picture reddish, for some reason.

The former version sounds more plausible to me; if it's the latter, might there be a compensatory better night-vision in the eyes that sees colours less vividly?

 

[dbelv]

I see colors warmer with one eye, cooler with the other. Have been like this as long as I can remember. Have not been treated for any eye injuries, cataracts. Have not asked an eye specialist. Glad to know I'm not the only one!

 

[Merrily]

I'm so glad you posted this. I just noticed this same phenomenon tonight. All of the replies relieved me. Now I will not be rushing off to the doctor in the morning. Thank you!
I was looking at my daughters face in dim night table lighting while rubbing one eye. When I opened it and rubbed the next, I saw an instant hue change from red/orange in the right eye to blue/green in the left. I have never noticed it before. Very strange. Kinda freaked me out!

 

[Bendelson]

I experience the same thing in certain lighting although my left eye usually views a redder tint while my right has a bluer tint. Very strange

 

[zoobyshoe]

I do not have the slightest trace of this. Colors are exactly the same viewed from either eye.

 

[Medicol]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterochromia_iridum
Our body parts are not perfectly symmetric. I think Lamarck theory actually works in this case (e.g people playing badminton often tend to have one of their arms longer than the other).

 

[Daniel78]

Funny I just started to Google 'My eyes see...' and came across this.
I have exactly the same – and notice it especially in the sunshine, when I'm laid on the beach for example.
One of my eyes sees a warmer, more red hue, and the other sees more green.
I'd like to think this gives me a better judgement of colour (I'm a graphic designer), a bit like stereo vision :)

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Yup, I've expressed this phenomenon to my eye doc for years. Left is cooler hue and right is warmer hue. Together they make a correct image :)

 

[zoki85]

Haven't noticed difference between my eyes regarding this matter. LOL, I was reading the title and thought it was about actual difference in colors between eyes in individual and not about perception of color. Photo of actress Jane Seymour:

 

[Pythagorean]

This may have genetic components, but it certainly has a sensitization component. If you were to put a bright orange card in front of one eye and a bright blue card in front of another eye for a minute or two, then look at a white wall, you'd see a difference in hue. If your environment provides a similar assymetric input, you'd experience similar phenomena.

Do people who have this still have it after staring at a white wall for five minutes? I'm curious to see if it's permanent in some people.

Here are some examples of hue desensitization:

1) if you stare at the black dot, the moving bar will eventually turn blue. This is opponent-process theory. The system that codes for orange also codes for blue. By staring at the black dot, your eye doesn't track the movement of the bar and eventually your vision field in that region gets desensitized to orange, leaving blue behind whenever the orange "disappears" (Gets replaced by background). The actual opponent set is blue/yellow. I'm guessing yellow is annoying so they go go orange and use a grey background.

2) look at the crosshair in the middle. In this case, you're desensitizing your red/green system to red, leaving green.

 

[vertigo6]

I first noticed a bilateral color perception asymmetry as a teenager, and I did not see any changes [in the differencing] over the subsequent 40+ years. My differences are small enough that I mostly forget that one eye sees the world as "slightly more Technicolor" than the other except under specific lighting conditions--typically when I am walking outside on a sunny Summer's day with lots of bright blue sky and minimal clouds.

I once mentioned this to a retinal specialist, and the clinic had a [related] test kit composed of two sets of approx 20 'marble sized' balls: one set shading from pure-white to off-white, the second a pastel spectrum. The patient tries to reorder each individual set "correctly" using only one eye at a time. Apparently my 'ordering mistakes' on all four tests were too low for the test to confirm a [significant] difference between my eyes.

 

[Drakkith]

2) look at the crosshair in the middle. In this case, you're desensitizing your red/green system to red, leaving green.

Not only do I get green, but eventually all of the purple blobs disappear completely, leaving me with only a green blob moving in a circle over a grey background.

 

[phinds]

About 5 times in the last 50 years or so I have very temporarily lost most of the yellow perception in one of my eyes (I forget which but I'm confident it was the same one every time). I first noticed it on Skyline Drive in the fall when the leaves were riotous with color and most recently when looking at green/yellow foliage along a highway. It never lasts more than a day and usually only a couple of hours. I asked a couple of eye doctors about it at various times over the years but I don't recall ever getting much of an answer.

I'm gathering from the other respondents in this thread that for others it is a permanent thing, yes?

 

[Pythagorean]

Not only do I get green, but eventually all of the purple blobs disappear completely, leaving me with only a green blob moving in a circle over a grey background.

I noticed that too. If you focus long and hard enough, the green dot starts to "wipe out" the pink dots as it goes around. Might be "change blindness" but not sure.

 

[Ernestm]

Could this be a case of X-inactivation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation) ? It is known that colorblindness is an X-linked recessive disorder. I'm not sure wether or not the timing of the X-inactivation is consistent with a significant difference of active/inactive versions of the genes between the two eyes, but if this indeed the case, females with cases of colorblindness in their family should be affected with higher probability. Lisab definitely fits the profile, it would be interesting to know if the other people who reported this color vision asymmetry do too!

 

[Belg_ian]

Hi I am a new guy thanks to everybody for this nice site, I'm always surprised how good the answers to questions are.
My 2 cents on the unequal color intensity, In my own vision I think I detect the iris adjustment when my hand is removed
from an eye that has been covered, in that time frame the objects initially appears brighter then the iris adjusts to appear less bright
That time could vary with initial light intensity or physiology.
so I had to allow for a settling response time to make a reasonable comparison. just 2 cents that is all

 

[mp3car]

Add me to the list... I noticed it a few years ago (I'm 35)... It's usually very subtle, with the degree of difference varying depending on lighting conditions. But doing it right now in warm flourescent lighting, red is definitely more "vivid" or brighter with my right eye than with my left.

I also thought of what DavidMcC mentioned regarding a laser. I am a pretty big fan of lasers and have been ever since 7th grade when i bought my first HeNe, and my first green DPSS pointer was back in the 90's when they were $400+ and red diode lasers were still $100. My latest DPSS pointers were $5-$10, but they are missing the IR cut filter, which means they are a bit more dangerous than they appear (why isn't it more common to find cheap DPSS but WITH the IR cut filter? I'd pay $5-$10 more to have one with the filter, rather than have to mess with adding a filter myself). Anyhow, there is a very real chance I've caught a stray beam...

 

[CarlosB]

One of the responses gave me a very interesting clue to test.
When I'm working in my house, when I see the laptop screen, the differences between my eyes rise. And it starts to be annoying because the image starts to "vibrate". It's not comfortable and you get tired very fast.
Now I'm seeing that in my right there is a big window that has a lot of light. That could be causing the difference?
I'm going to change the distribution, to work with the light equally to both eyes. If this fix the problem, i'll tel you.