Is your light and sound sensitivity one sided?

My N=1:
No, this symptom is not lateralised; and yes, blocking one eye or one ear helps.

For me, reducing the input by covering one eye or ear reduces the degree of discomfort and sense of exertion, and in the case of eyes can be useful as I can still see.

But it makes no difference which eye or ear. And there is no obvious difference in the type of light or sound sensitivity I perceive (only a difference of degree) between having one eye or ear covered and having neither, so for me there is no indication of lateralisation in that symptom.

An important addendum concerns stereopsis. I often read with one eye pressed into the mattress or pillow and one eye, usually the dominant one, doing the work. In fact I’m doing it right now. My sense is that I do this not to reduce light sensitivity but because stereopsis is not necessary for reading. Turning it off by covering one eye seems to reduce the load on my brain.

An additional factor is that I’m extremely myopic. I only cover one eye when I am reading my phone with my glasses off. My maximum focal length without glasses is 13cm. Stereopsis between 0 and 13cm is quite easily replaced by other strategies (like using my finger to feel where my phone is) and moreover stereopsis in that scenario is likely to be particularly taxing on the brain since the two images are so different.

(I can read perfectly well with my glasses on at a normal reading distance of 30-40cm, but often choose not to. I suspect that, even when using both eyes, reading without glasses has a double exertion benefit: it eliminates the weight of my glasses and ensures there is no visual information past 13cm for me to filter out.)

If I’m not reading, however, and the light becomes unpleasant, I shade both eyes rather than covering one. In a context where I need depth information, stereopsis is presumably the most efficient way to obtain that. Shading only one eye would put a higher demand on the brain’s other methods for calculating depth, making it a poor method to reduce exertion. It appears my subconscious has worked out when stereopsis is worth the effort and when it isn’t.

 

If this is a poll type think my experience is no.

But sometimes I have one eye get sore or one ear feel blocked and it comes and goes with PEM. But that’s different to the “sensitivity”, or as I think of it, low PEM-threshold related to sensory inputs.

 

No, not at all. The quality of sound and colour are noticeably different depending on which side is covered, but I think that's just decrepitude.

Subjectively at least, the sensory intolerance doesn't feel much different to that of acute illness.

 

Yes, my sound sensitivity is much worse on the left side than the right. I experience much worse paresthesia on my left side in general.

I often use different "strength" earplugs for this reason, for example Loop Quiet in my left ear and Loop Experience in my right.

My light sensitivity is equally bad on both sides, though.

ETA: It seems I misunderstood your question though, sorry. I'll still leave this comment up, for what it's worth.

 

I have sound sensitivity, I don't have light sensitivity. The sound sensitivity is not one-sided in my case.

 

No.

 

No, it feels equally overwhelming on both sides.

However (and I know this is only tangentially related) my tinnitus sometimes presents as only in one ear or worse in one ear, and the same for certain visual disturbances I get (vision going dark when I roll over or raise my arms overhead, television static-like colourful dots across field of vision).

 

Don't think so.

 

If I remember my basic neurology:

Covering one eye would not necessarily reveal if light sensitivity was lateralised, as though we have right and left visual fields lateralised in the brain both eyes feed into each: the right half of both retinas feed into the left visual cortex and the left half of both retinas feed into the right visual cortex.

I am not sure how you would investigate lateralisation of light sensitivity unless you obliged people to look forward and controlled the amount of light in different parts of the visual fields.