Heterochromia and Autism

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I was born with a rare eye difference called heterochromia - one of my eyes has an iris with two different colours, a patch of brown in an otherwise green iris (my other iris is all green). There is another form of heterochromia where eyes can change colour back and forth, and my son has this; sometimes he has green eyes, sometimes blue eyes. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch has eyes like my son's, and the photos of him taken at different times show the changes very starkly.

Today I was surfing the net and discovered that heterochromia, though rare in all populations including the ASD population, is far more likely to occur (when it does) to people who are on the AS spectrum. (Most people on the spectrum, though, don't have heterochromia at all).

I surfed the net googling things like "people with heterochromia" today and found a list of famous people with heterochromia that was sorted by career - eg scientist, actor and so on. It was interesting that the largest subgroup by far was acting. I have often read - here and elsewhere - that ASD may be over-represented amongst actors, which some think may be because many ASD people practice acting to better pass as neurotypicals from an early age; personally I think that is likely to be the case.

Photos of Benedict Cumberbatch's heterochromia: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/acto ... mberbatch/ (scroll down for the contrasting photos)

My eyes could look green one day, blue the next, and gray the day after that

That form is called "sectoral heterochromia". Welcome to the rare eyes club!

My eyes are deep-set, though.

I bet your eyes are nice and prominent.

I have a small brown ring around my pupils. When I was a kid, my eyes were bright green, but at some point, they changed to a dark, slightly grey-ish blue. I didn't notice the brown ring until after that, so I don't know if it was there when they were green or not.

That's another form of heterochromia called "central heterochromia" (the brown ring around the pupil)

My eye color shifts from different shades of grey to what looks black.

Up close the iris is a combination of light grey and very dark grey.

There's a special name for it, maybe one mentioned in this thread but l don't remember it.

I think that may be some other condition. It sounds like your eyes are one colour (grey) in various shades of grey from very dark to light? That would count as one colour, whereas heterochromia (AFAIK) involves two completely different colours.

PS: eyes of a single colour can vary in intensity according to changes in your diet. The green part of my eyes gets much greener if I eat a lot of foods containing potassium. The change in intensity is sometimes baffling to people who know me well. I was mystified too until my optometrist explained the mineral intake connection to me. I assume that this can happen to anyone, to varying degrees, if they eat the foods that tend to affect eye colour, and it's unrelated to heterochromia.

I had this at least when I was a little younger. My mom though my eyes were going to be bright blue, but they turned out dark brown .

I have your type, B19.

Was teased for it in school, and one time in class, a trainee art teacher even said "Oh wow, do you know what that MEANS???" and then the bell rang and she didn't get a chance to explain. She was very hippie/mystical, so I don't know if she was about to tell me I'm a witch or the Chosen One or what, lol.

I also have congenital bilateral snowflake cataracts although they don't show, only an optometrist can see them. Apparently that's an even rarer condition.

my eyes look nominally brown from a distance but up close they more resemble a mottled olive-drab, like a mostly desaturated brown revealing an undertone of weak yellow.

Years ago I was told that in old Scots folklore, the "mark in the eye" kind of heterochromia that you and I have was considered to denote the fey child, who was believed to have inherited second sight from a clan ancestor. (I was amazed to find this PhD thesis on Scottish second sight!! https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/9674)

I was luckier than you BIF as for me there was no teasing, onlookers were admiring or fascinated. The question I was most often asked was "is that a birthmark in your eye?" (which in a way it is, sort of, though of a special kind ) People who had only met me briefly in the past would remember it if they encountered me years later, and say "I remember meeting you, you are that girl with the brown mark in your eye!"

On the net, there are lots of positive comments about heterochromia BIF so I hope you soak the positivity up!

Sounds like the eye colour called hazel? I think that's a fascinating eye colour to have, though it's not considered to be a form of heterochromia, but a variant in the normal range and one that people vote for as particularly attractive.

LOL!

Why do nearly all babies' eyes change colour soon after birth? Answer is here:
http://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/eye-color.htm

Oh lol. Guess that's normal . Now can you fix my other vision issues too?

I think my eyes changed between green and blue until I was in fifth or sixth grade, and then they finally settled on blue.