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Strange7 comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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Whenever I wear polarized lenses I can see patterns in safety-glass, and more bands on rainbows than would regularly be there; most other people I've met are similar.
One day, on a long car trip, I was talking to the guy sitting next to me and he was able to see these things with his eyes uncovered. I haven't the faintest clue whether this is a hardware or a software difference, either seem feasible.
I would think hardware. Polarization isn't something you can reconstruct from just color, but naturally-polarized lenses occur in nature and thus could have been produced by a mutation.
You're thinking about this all wrong. It's biological so the hardware IS the software.
A better question would be: is the difference in the eye or the brain? This you could test by taking some blue-detecting cones from the retinas of people who can and cannot detect Haidinger's brush and see if they respond differently to changes in polarization.
My understanding is that all humans have the 'hardware' to see polarized light, but that most of us filter it out -- that is, it is a software issue. However, you could also phrase this as 'the eyes register the light, but the brain discards the information'.