I do! – or at least I used to!
And as it turns out, we all do! It’s just a matter of how we use our eyes!
First – a little background.
Our vision is a wonderful thing! Truly amazing. But with binocular vision, most humans have a dominant eye. This is the one that latches on to what is being viewed just a hair more quickly than the other eye. You are probably very familiar with the myriad of tests available to check one’s eye dominance. If you are lucky, your dominant eye is on the same side as your dominant hand (I am not one of those lucky ones – that is why I shoot left even though I am right-handed).
In the March 2023 edition of Clay Target Nation, there was a very good article entitled “See Better, Shoot Better”. Here is the link to the issue in case you missed it:
https://www.claytargetnation-digital.com/publication/?m=65619&i=783316&p=1&ver=html5
In the article, Ed Lyons made a passing reference to some research that had been done on eye dominance and included a reference to the research article. Unfortunately, I had difficulty with getting the link to function that was printed in the article. With a little help from google, I was able to find it! Here is the link:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698901000797?via%3Dihub
To say that this article was life changing for me may be just short of how I felt after reading it!
The study concluded that pretty much everyone’s eye dominance shifts once you focus your eyes more than about 15 degrees off-center… So, if you are looking down the barrel and shift your eyes, say 20 degrees back from the gun, to look for the target while maintaining your head position down on the gun with your nose pointed straight ahead, guess what? Your eyes are going to switch up dominance (assuming you are looking to the side opposite your dominance). Hallelujah! I haven’t been crazy all of this time! My right eye has been taking over on some of those shots – just as it should according to the research!
As it turns out, this corresponds very well with what my shooting coach, Brian DeMott, had been telling me all along – nothing good happens when you move your eyes too far off of the barrel. We all tend to learn best when we absorb the same information in multiple ways. Having read this study, hearing it from my coach, and experiencing it while shooting made it all gel for me! I now have a tool in my quiver that allows me to make my eyes work the way I want them too – by using them the correctly!
Hopefully this will be helpful to others who have “shifty eyes”! Keep them within 15 degrees of center and good things will happen! Give it a try.