Edit: My thought process is that using one eye would still cause enough uncomfortable sensations that closing / squinting both eyes is the only viable option but apparently not. One eye is completely normal and painless.
This happened to me when I was driving the other day and I was worried I’d have to pull over on the highway, but when I closed one eye I was able to see with no pain sensation whatsoever with roughly the same amount of light radiation entering my 👁.
I know it’s technically less light for my brain to process, less intense on the nerve signals firing but I couldn’t intuitively get to the bottom of this because the common person might assume having one eye open could be worse?
In: Physics
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One way to force your pupils to accommodate faster is to quickly blink both eyes repeatedly when you change light levels. I don’t know the mechanism behind it but it works for very bright sunlight and for darkness.
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I have a permanently dilated pupil in one eye, when it’s sunny my eyelid compensates by pretty much closing completely when it’s too bright. I didn’t realize this was something other people experienced, thanks for posting.
I think this explains why I close one eye to look at my phone screen when I’m too drunk and in the dark because the screen too bright? It’s so much easier looking at it with one eye.
I used to stare at the sun as a kid and see how long I could hold the stare….but I’m sure that’s not why I wear glasses, no not at all
I dont know about you, but the eye I close is the sun side one, and I use my face as shade for the other.
Theorizing here.
Unless you turn your head to directly face the sun, which would be uncomfortable to do, one eye will be somewhat shielded from the sun by our brow and nose.
The optical nerves that links each eye to the brain forms an “X” because the left eye’s nerve connects to the right side of the brain and vice versa.
When both eyes see bright light, a lot of signal goes through the nerves and it takes a few seconds for our eyes to adjust to send less signal. These signals meet at the center of the “X” where the nerves cross over, called the optic chiasm. Too much nerve signal in one region can be interpreted as pain by the brain.
Closing one eye helps reduce the overall amount of signal below a pain-causing level as our eyes adjust to the bright surroundings.
Compressive lesions on this optic chiasm can cause photophobia (sensitivity to light) because it’s worsening the “traffic jam” of nerve signals: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11937897/
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