How can you explain a person's frequent eye colour change throughout the day using a genetic model?
Light sources with very different spectra and an iris which is not heavily saturated in pgiment. In those settings, phenomena including scattering and diffraction and the specific distribution of pigment will influence the perceived eye color greatly.
Apart from exogenous factors like the lighting environment is there any catalytic genetic processes or cognitive processes involved in transient eye colour? For example, I think there are situations where the lighting can be stable/controlled and the eye colour still changes. I notice that when I think deeply about something and speak with honesty my eye colour changes and also becomes more transparent.
I don't think a cognitive process can control the color of the eye, at least directly. The color of the iris can be dependent on the blood flow inside the retinal blood vessels (Albinos iris color is red because of that phenomenon). Thinking, or doing any sort of intellectual or physical efforts will increase (or decrease, like during meditation) the blood pressure, which, if your iris color is very clear, might change its color.
Hi Patrick, I have read up on these processes and I think myosis and mydriasis could be a cause in transient eye colour by contractions of the eye muscles controlling the size of the iris and increasing blood flow to the nerves in this area of the eye. It seems like you will get the greatest change in eye colour when both these processes are working at their hardest (a more transparent iris) vs. when they are not so active (a more opaque iris). What do you think?
It makes sense to me that you don't actually inherit eye colour per say but rather you inherit the genes that make the proteins in the iris. For instance, You and your mum may have the same eye colour at certain times but not all the time. Eye colour depends not just on the genes but on external light sources and internal body processes like mydriasis and myosis.
Sounds most like subjective differences in your judgement of the color and/or changes in the lighting. If you take pictures under controlled conditions I imagine your eye color will be unchanged.
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