system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What advantage does the eye's (or brain's) white-balance-like system give, and how does it work?

So I have noticed that when I close my right eye for a while and keep my left eye open in broad daylight, I see warmer colours in my left eye and see cooler colours in my right eye when I open it. This is similar to the white balance in smartphone cameras.

But is there any evolutionary advantage to this? And how does it work?
gpt
Auto color balance lets you see things in all kinds of light conditions (dynamic range is something like a factor of a billion!) and perceive colors correctly despite variations in the color of the illumination.  The mechanism is fatigue in your retinal cells, which makes each cell’s response self-adjust as fresh unexposed pigment gets regenerated in the eye.  In bright light not only does the total amount of pigment shrink, the rate of regeneration also shrinks.  There are other time dependent and spatially-dependent adjustment mechanisms but that is the dominant one.