During the Red session (and since it is a heat lamp, there is also IR involved), lots of Red light enters the eye
1. For the Red sensing L cones, this is a LOT of light
2. For the brightness perception (how bright the light is), it is fairly dim, therefore the pupil is large and it does not control effectively enough the amount of Red light entering the eye, increasing the effect of "1."
Retinal cells see light by generation and destruction of a neurotransmitter - a chemical acting as messenger to deliver a signal in our body. The cell, when not exposed to light, generates the neurotransmitter. Exposure to light inhibits the generation, and requires the cell to recover in order to be able to recept light again
When stressed (by having to recover under exposure to abnormal quantity of light, whether by brightness, time or both), retinal cells become "tired", and their output signal range fades. For example (numbers just for the show), if a non tired cell reports between 0 for dark to 1000 for bright light, a depleted cell might be able to report only between 0 and 50 for the same range..
As long as we are in the same Red lit room, everything is monochromatic between Black and Red (not really, the spectrum of a heat lamp is quite wide, but it only covers a narrow band of the visible light spectrum, so the effect is still similar). So be it 0..1000 (just entered the room) or 0..50 (been there for a long while, (and since we are analog, the range is continuous and not discrete), this range does represent all the available visual information either way : We dont see any information loss
When we exit from the room, the L cones are depleted and max out at 50, while the M and S weren't even activated by the Red light
- We look at something White (not glaring, say 500..500..500), the cells transmit : 25 Red, 500 Green, 500 Blue
- We look at something Cyan (0..500..500), the cells transmit : 0 Red, 500 Green, 500 Blue
It looks very likely that we will render the 2 different colors almost the same, untill the L cells recover and start reporting closer to reality. In the meanwhile, we try to render the colors by information completion, so render both the White and Cyan as unidentifiable Grey-ish color
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