Background:
I’m right eye dominant and right handed. I started shooting red dots within a few months of starting shooting. The bulk of my dry fire and live fire has been with dots. Most of my shooting involves movement and vision tracking at very high speeds and efficiency. I can shoot irons competently now that I shoot pistol dots well.
I recently started shooting long guns and that requires non-dominant eye shooting on weak side.
I have some observations and hypotheses from my own experience and testing.
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Totem Polar
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Clusterfrack
Ready for nerdery?
Here we go.
One of my guiding philosophies for learning and performance is that the more direct the input and output, the more efficient, rapid, reproducible and accurate. For macro things like draws and trigger you can see it on video.
But there are micro components that you cannot see.
From neurobiology, the FASTEST reflexes come from the simplest feedback loops. One neuron in and one neuron out. Short distance, high fidelity, less disruption possibilities.
To me in shooting, that’s a goal for vision and targeting.
Iron shooters and lens occluded dot shooters use their non-dominant eye to “superimpose” the target and sight from dominant eye together. This also happens when you have a large, bright reticle.
But how complicated is that wiring compared to direct, single eye feedback of a small dot on a target?
In the visual processing of the brain, binocular vision is quite complicated and it requires a lot of processing and ocular muscle coordination.
If you were to design a system for speed and efficiency, you’d want the most direct input and output.
From our lizard brains, the very ancient parts of our vision centers are extremely good at linear processing and comparison of simple shapes. Single dot on target. We are set up for that. Snap up the fly when it gets on target.
But if you have to bring in separate eye integration for the comparison, it slows things down and adds opportunities for failure. (Note this is different than binocular vision where you can see both target and sights like if you were actually a lizard hunting, we’re talking about separating out target vision with sight vision into different channels here).
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Personally I shoot irons predominantly single eye processing even though I use both eyes for depth and motion and both eyes are open. You can do the experiment yourself by putting Vaseline on the non-dominant sunglass lens and see how that affects your processing and shooting at speed.
I thought maybe it was just strong eye dominance, but it isn’t. Because when I went to weak eye PCC it was the same thing being single eye processing with the weak eye now.
It’s also the issue I found in loss of speed and fidelity when I was using circle dot on PCC and had to use non-dominant eye for target superimposition. I’ve switched back to pistol dot single eye processing on PCC with marked improvement in tracking coordination at speed.
Grauffel I heard shoots PCC with single dot reticle like he does pistol which is different than a lot of rifle predominant shooters. Similarly Max Michel, Christian Sailer, and JJ Racaza don’t advocate for the taped lens training as early dot adopters compared to Mason Lane and Ben Stoeger who are iron shooters that might be more trained in their binocular integration.
You could say “maybe I should train binocular” because it can be done.
My point is that for biology, the simplest and most direct feedback loop is “best” so that’s what I want.
That’s my nerdery $0.02 for the day.