Why you squint, pirates, and millions of dollars lost in the sporting goods industry!
Because I'm right handed, but my eyes are left handed - sound crazy? Read on to see how society has messed up a lot of us with assumptions about being right or left handed.
Yesterday I went to an Archery range with my boss (perhaps a tale for another time). When I shoot a bow, I close my left eye for a very uncomfortable squint to take aim on the target. This one eye squint is annoying. I can hit the target, pretty good too, but the squinting is super annoying. But what is crazy is that this is all caused by bad marketing.
The subject (sounds boring, but we will get to pirates in a moment) is about eye dominance. Eye dominance is like being left or right handed except your eyes are also left or right dominant too and they don't always match your hand dominance.
The squinting and poor aiming comes when your eyes and your hands don't have the same dominant side. Simply you use a bow, a gun, darts, throw a ball, and some tools are meant for or depend on a right handed person but your eyes are aiming like a lefty.
Nothing special, right? I'd hazard a guess that their are millions of people with their lives affected by not understanding this little known fact about our eyes. Perhaps that is worth billions of dollars especially in recreational sports.
If you do one thing today, test your eye dominance (instructions below). Have your friends test theirs and if you have children, please have them test their eye dominance too. This isn't a medical issue about eye disease, it is simple quality of life as you will soon see (pun intended).
The revelation of a lifetime
I had not plied my archery habit in over 20 years, so I thought I'd read the latest literature in preparation of buying a new target shooting bow. But in an odd corner of one archery web site I started to read about eye dominance. I was floored by the simple statement that I was aiming with the wrong eye. Suddenly a lifetime of squinting from archery, to target shooting, to even using my telescope were seen as something totally avoidable - if it was taught to me as a child.
Squinting is something that every expert, from archery to darts and many sports, will tell you is bad. Very bad! Enter the pirate eye patch left over from last year's pirate theme party. Eye patches work, but they are frowned upon unless you really are a card carrying pirate. The patch really is just a crutch for more comfortable squinting. But why squint or join a band of pirates? Why is eye dominance a huge issue? What is up with squinting?
Lets look at the geometry (sorry) of eye dominance. Simply, one eye is oriented to look directly at an object, while the other is looking from the side. Imagine in pool (billiards), if you have the cue stick held in the right hand, your right eye is above the cue and looking straight at the cue ball. The left eye is looking at an angle at the ball. Of course this is only true with a person with right eye dominance. A person with left eye dominance must squint or play left handed (I play pool as a lefty and never knew why until now).
We assume the right hand is related to the eye we aim with. So if I buy a bow, gun, or many other implements built for right handers, I squint and likely miss what I aim at. Even in a simple game like darts, the eye you align your dart and target to will make a huge difference in accuracy.
Right handed with left eye dominant (or the opposite) people don't learn that left handed aiming will stop the squinting. They are just criticized about the squinting. They become social misfits of the accuracy club... or pirates.
The right may be left
Why our preconceptions and marketing are making you squint.
The answer to why we continue to squint when aiming is simple marketing, my friends. If you are right handed, everything is supposed to be on the right (pardon me for leaving behind my left handed friends for a bit). If you are right handed, you buy right handed scissors, right handed bows, right handed mice, your keyboard has the all important return key on the right.
Keep the marketing simple. Why look at the uncomfortable scientific research? And hey, why stock more stuff for lefties, isn't that low odds for a sale? But the reason the marketing sounds like this is that we just want to sell the right handed products because of a collective assumption of left and right handedness.
The assumption that the whole body (except the brain) is right or left dominant. Now it is time for some research and a few facts.
Eye dominance and hand dominance
and the horror of statistics
A study at USC showed that slightly more than 50% of men and women did not have the same hand dominance to their eye dominance. In other words you have about a 50% chance being a pirate or squinting.
In another study we can see the real evil of hand/eye dominance differences. In competitive Archery 62% were right handed and right eyed. But only 12% of shooters are right handed but left eyed. What? Based on statistics, the number of left/right eye should be about the same.
What does this mean? A lot people gave up archery that were left eyed and right handed... because they should have been shown on day one that they needed a left-handed bow.
If the Archery market concentrated on educating new customers that the eye is more important than the hand, this should be 50%. For coaches it is an astounding 3% for lefty eyed marksmen that sign autographs with their right hand - the rest quit because of squinting.
For football, two thirds of players have the same hand and eye dominance. No wonder my spirals were clean, but missed the person I threw to. Imagine wearing an eye patch on the football field!!!! If you don't have the same hand/eye dominance, you better be good at tackling.
Pirates!
Why do pirates have eye patches? My guess is that it is all about telescopes. If you are left eye dominant, you should look through your pirate issue telescope with your left eye. But the marketing for the telescope is usually littered with scantily clad wenches holding the scope in the right hand and looking through the right eye. Pirate monkey see, pirate monkey do. But the 50% of pirates end up getting a patch (assuming a hook on the right hand is a sign pirates as a group are generally right handed).
So, right handed, left eyed, and peer pressure of a lovely marketing wench, Q.E.D. the pirate must use a patch to keep from looking like a squinting land lubber. The patch becomes a constant accessory because only sissy pirates use a patch to look through their scopes. The peg leg is probably a result of an injury due to depth perception and a bad fall rather than hard core swashbuckling.
Pirates are cool, but it is the eye patch that has always annoyed me and now I know why. I hate pirates and their smug eye patches because they look cool, quick with a musket pistol, and can use a telescope, all without squinting.
I am sure my fellow lefty eyed compatriots would join me in raising a toast to the demize of eye patch pirates. But via marketing and the popularity of pirates by Disney and others, hard to rock the boat. The only pirates to hate nowadays are Somali Pirates and they probably use binoculars because I have never seen one with an eye patch.
Testing for eye dominance
Hold out your arm in front of you and make a circle with your thumb and second finger (the universal hand sign for OK.
Look through the circle of your hand at a small object in the distance. Now close your left eye. If the object stays in the circle, you are left eye dominant. If the object moves, you are right eye dominant.
Another interesting tip is that if you are aiming with one eye closed and aiming with the non-dominant eye, you will struggle to keep the dominant eye closed. This is why, in part, that using an eye patch is feels better because your dominant eye isn't struggling to see.
Show me the money!
Do you sell anything (tools, sporting goods) where aim is important? Educate your customers and if your tools are right or left handed, stop selling based on the hands, but the eyes. You may not sell eye patches this way, but you will sell more products to happier customers.
Not every right hander can use left handed equipment. Odds are that you will win over more than you have before. You also have a more educated consumer that is aware of the problem and can correct for it.
Change your marketing! Start with the simple eye dominance test and sell to the right (or left) dominance of the customer. Put it on the first page of the manual! It does not matter one bit that your product is the most accurate if your customers are squinting or just plain horrible with your great equipment.
The catchphrase here is "repeat business". If the use of your product causes eye strain, I won't use it as much. If I don't use it, I don't get into the sport and buy new stuff. You loose me because you either sold me the wrong stuff or didn't educated me on one of the most important subjects for success.
There is a downside. If you teach people that lefty equipment is good for right handers, you need to stock up on the left handed products. Maybe sell more ambidextrous designs? For pool or darts, the only downside is a rework of the manual to test eye dominance and show how to aim accurately for your situation.
The good news perhaps is that all those lefties out there might find what they want in stock. Remember, 50% of lefties are right eye dominant and could use the righty's equipment.
Please send me a check when your sales numbers go up. Eye patches were cheap, but now I am looking at a very expensive left handed bow.
Extra goodies
Here are a few excellent explanations for different target-intensive sports and ways to correct for mismatched hand/eye dominance: Archery, Billiards/Pool , Darts, other sports.
Also found the book: The Dominance Factor: How Knowing Your Dominant Eye, Ear, Brain, Hand, & Foot Can Improve Your Learning
. What is interesting is that it is the only one on Amazon that is clearly aimed at both eye and other body dominance issues.Have you done the eye dominance test yet? Are you a pirate or are you ready to ditch the patch for the right equipment?
