Every now and then, a bit of nostalgia bait drifts across my social media feed, with people pining for the brighter colors of the past – the vivid hues of the Toys R Us logo, or a 90s McDonald’s play zone. On Reddit, posters observe: “As I get older it feels like life is losing its color,” and ask: “Were colors brighter and more vibrant when I was younger?”
Indeed, according to research from the UK’s Science Museum Group, there’s been a stark increase in gray everyday objects since the mid-20th century. But this dullification may go beyond the modern preponderance of ashen cars, sad beige nurseries and millennial gray apartments. Scientists believe that color perception itself can fade, altering how the world appears. Depending on how your eyes – and brain – age, the bright red balloon you remember from your seventh birthday party might not look as vivid if you came across it again at 93.
Changes in color perception can occur for several reasons. One common factor is structural shifts in the eye. For instance, a cataract – a condition that clouds the eye’s lens – can gradually tint vision with a yellow-brown “brunescent” hue. In the US, about 4m cataract surgeries are performed annually. A brunescent lens “can pull the blue and green out” of the world around us, says Dr Andrew Iwach of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. After a cataract is removed, the difference in color clarity afterward can be so striking that Iwach wears a bright blue tie to delight his recovering patients.
Changes in color perception can also be caused by glaucoma or macular degeneration. Iwach recommends routine eye exams, and says if you notice this type of change, see an ophthalmologist. Research from 2024 found that up to 15% of global dementia cases could be linked to problems with color perception issues, meaning that an eye exam can be an important step in screening and mitigating the disease.
Some medications can also affect color perception, says Iwach – namely Viagra (pilots are required to abstain from the drug eight hours before flying lest it affect their perception of blue hues) and some types of heart and tuberculosis medications.
Yet research suggests that even in the absence of eye disease or medication use, color perception can shift over the course of our lives.
Dr Janneke van Leeuwen, a social neuroscientist and honorary research fellow at University College London’s Queen Square Institute of Neurology, noticed a subtle trend in behavioral studies from the last three decades: older adults consistently rated colors duller than younger participants did.
Van Leeuwen set out to investigate: do we truly see the world differently as we age? And if so, is it the eyes or the brain driving that change?
Her 2023 study involved 17 young adults and 20 older adults in “an eye tracking experiment” featuring 26 colors, which varied in lightness (how light or dark a color appears) and saturation (how pure and intense a color appears).
Using a camera that recorded pupil diameter 1,000 times per second, Van Leeuwen’s team observed how participants’ pupils reacted to each color. They found a reduction in the way older people’s pupils responded to more highly saturated colors, even when correcting for the shrunken baseline pupil sizes that come with age.
Thus, it seems some older adults may genuinely perceive the world as less colorful. Van Leeuwen recalls one participant saying: “Oh, it’s a shame there’s not a real punchy red.” “I was thinking: ‘Well, you’re looking at one!’” she says.
The issue, Van Leeuwen explains, “doesn’t necessarily originate in the eyes, but in the brain”.
Pupil responses are controlled by the Edinger-Westphal nucleus, a midbrain structure that receives input from the retina and the visual cortex. This means that pupillary reactions reflect both what the eyes detect and how the brain processes that information.
The brain becomes less sensitive to how saturated and vivid colors are not because the eyes fail to register them, says Van Leeuwen, but because the visual cortex may no longer interpret them with the same intensity.
“Older adults seem to be particularly less sensitive to the intensity of colors on the magenta-green pathway,” she adds, referring to the anatomical structures in the eye that help process colors. More research is needed to understand why, but the cause probably lies in how the cones in our eyes interact with color-processing pathways in the brain. Currently, Van Leeuwen is following up her study with an investigation into how differences in saturation perception influence the way colors make younger and older adults feel.
The 2023 study’s findings align with a phenomenon called the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect: the brain’s tendency to perceive highly saturated colors as brighter than less saturated ones, even if their actual lightness is the same. Believed to be an evolutionary trait for important evaluations such as the ripeness of fruit, this effect also takes place in the primary visual cortex. This “further supports our findings that the decline in sensitivity in color saturation in healthy ageing originates in the brain, and not the eyes”, says Van Leeuwen.
There is no sign this loss of saturation perception follows the same process as the onset of certain types of dementia, Van Leeuwen emphasizes – many older adults experience vision declines without developing dementia, which has multiple risk factors. However, the study does provide insight into how our brains change as a result of normal, healthy ageing, which is useful context in the study of neurological disease.
Is there anything you can do to stop age-related declines in saturation perception? Researchers don’t currently believe that lifestyle habits can meaningfully influence this process. But there’s some evidence that the brain can be “trained” to see the world differently. Anya Hurlbert, a color and vision scientist at Newcastle University, points to a 2020 study involving EnChroma glasses, which feature a saturation-boosting tint to help reduce the effects of some types of color blindness. Participants with red-green color perception deficiencies who wore the glasses reported seeing increased color saturation even after removing them.
Alternatively, simply surrounding oneself with more intense colors could help. As Van Leeuwen notes, “Older adults tend to evaluate more saturated colors more positively than younger adults … which seems to suggest they might need the extra stimulation.”
Just another reason to see the new Wes Anderson movie.
