How Do I Change Eye Dominance?

Eye dominance occurs when an individual has a tendency to prefer the visual information being received by one eye over the other eye. The eye that is dominant will look at an object directly while the eye that is not dominant will look at the same object at a slight angle. This slight difference between the eyes is what creates depth perception. Eye dominance is not necessarily related to your preferred writing hand, although right-handed individuals tend to have right-eye dominance. A dominant eye is important for those who shoot a gun.

Determine which of your eyes is dominant. An easy test is to keep both eyes open and look at an object that is a minimum of 20 feet away. Raise your right arm and point at this object. While your arm is pointing at the object, cover your left eye with your left hand. While continuing to point at the object, uncover your left eye and cover your right eye. The eye that is dominant is the eye that perceives your arm to remain pointing at the object. When the dominant eye is covered, your arm will appear to have moved and no longer be pointing at the object, even though you have not moved your arm.

Obscure part of your dominant eye. This will force the other eye to become dominant. When shooting, this can be achieved by smearing grease on the shooting lens so the dominant eye cannot see. Shutting your dominant eye and making corrections until you are shooting on target when using your nondominant eye will eventually force it to become dominant.

Keep practicing using your nondominant eye and obscuring the dominant eye. Eye dominance becomes fixed at about 10 years of age and muscle memory is used. This can take a very long time to overcome. If you cannot learn to shoot on the side with eye dominance, then just keep practicing to change your eye dominance. If you are really desperate, consider wearing an eyepatch over the dominant eye. This forces the other eye to do all the work.