LASIK and Eye Surgery Blog - Clearview Eye and Laser Medical Center

Monday, January 7, 2008

Identifying Your Dominant Eye

Our two eyes work together, each sending its image information through its optic nerve and leaving it for the brain to sort out the differences, determine what the image is, and find a name for it.

Subjectively, we aren’t usually aware of seeing two slightly different versions of everything. But if you close one eye and then the other you'll see the slightly different perspectives. All of us have a dominant eye, though it's not an issue and not something we would ever think about. It's also not connected to being right- or left-handed.

You can find our which is your dominant eye with a simple test.

  1. Take a piece of paper and cut a hole in the middle about an inch square.
  2. Hold it at arm's length and look through the hole at something stationary.
  3. Keep your eyes on that object and slowly bring the piece of paper towards your face until it touches your nose.
  4. Now the hole is directly in front of your dominant eye.

Our dominant eye is the one that looks directly at objects. The non-dominant eye looks at a slight angle. It's a good thing we have this discrepancy because it gives us depth perception. Using the two perspectives, the brain can judge relative distances.

Eye dominance becomes an important factor if you are considering monovision to correct presbyopia ("middle-age" vision with those darn reading glasses). A monovision treatment gives one eye a contact lens or LASIK treatment for near vision and leaves the other eye as is. How would Dr. Feldman decide which eye to treat? It would be the dominant eye, because that's the one which looks directly at objects.

posted by JennyK at 10:51 AM

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San Diego LASIK Center

Sandy T. Feldman, M.D., M.S. :: ClearView Eye and Laser Medical Center
6255 Lusk Blvd., Suite 100 :: San Diego, California 92121

“She’s the Surgeon to See”