Dear Axel,
My fault! It was a poor explanation.
The "gaze" is the direction the eyeballs are oriented in their sockets in the head. Each eyeball is seated in a pocket in the skull that is lined with fatty tissue. The back of the eyeball is connected directly into the brain by the optic nerve cable that enters the skull thru a hole at the back of the eyeball. Each eyeball is controlled by a girdle of six strap-like muscles that reach out from behind and attach along the side of the eyeball. To look left, the left side muscles pull and the right side muscles relax, and so forth for the different directions. These eye muscles are also rigged with nerves that tell the brain what they are doing. So in addition to simply seeing where your eyes are aimed and comparing that to where your head is aimed, these nerves directly monitor and choose which way to point the eyes in reference to which way the head is pointed.
The eyeball swivels silently about in the pocket of fatty tissue, so it's hard to pay attention to gaze changes. The way I pay attention is to notice the shape of my field of view out of one or the other eye. The shape and features of the head (eyebrows, nose, cheeks, corners of the eye sockets) define the boundaries of the field of view since our eyes are seated in our heads instead of being on stalks like crab eyes. The shape of each field of view is like an egg shape. Close one eye and observe this shape.
A "straight ahead" gaze is when the eyeballs are directed in THE SAME DIRECTION that the head and face are facing, aimed straight and level out of the face. Thus, if you stood on an ocean shore with good posture facing out to sea and looked at a ship on the horizon, your gaze would be oriented straight and level out of your face. If you used a pirate's spyglass to look at the ship, the tube of the spyglass would point perpendicularly out of the plane of the face and would lie parallel or horizontal to the sea. Looking straight out, the line of vision passes out the pupil horizontally away and cuts thru the egg shape field of view in one and only one spot. This spot is directly inside the bridge of the nose about 1 inch, since the two pupils are separated by about 2 inches in humans on either side of the nose. The spot is also along the line across the eyes that includes the tops of the two ears or temples, the two outside corners of the eyes, the two pupils, the two inside corners of the eyes, and the bridge of the nose. I call this line the "horizon line." looking out to sea, the horizon line of the sea off in the distance would match this physiological line across the field of vision. If you wear glasses and look straight ahead thru only one eye (dominant eye), the line of sight passes thru one and only one spot on the lens. This spot is on the line out your pupil, across the horizon line and out this spot on the lens. The line of sight is perpendicular to your face (or the "plane" of your face). Your head is "facing" the same direction as your line of sight. If you painted ared dot with a marker on the lens where this line of sight passes thru, then this is the spot that your gaze must look thru at any time you are "gazing straight ahead." Any other gaze direction does NOT look thru this spot on the lens. I call this spot the "aim spot" in your egg-shaped field of vision.
If you stand in front of a bathroom mirror with good posture and look straight into your own pupil while also facing straight into the mirror, your line of sight connects the real pupil thru the horizon line and spot on the lens or field of view with the mirror pupil and this line of sight is perpendicular to your face and the mirror and is also parallel to the floor. Similarly, if you position the end of a drinking straw or other narrow and long tube at the pupil like a spyglass and hold the tube so that it points straight and level out of the face at the mirror, it will "target" your pupil in the mirror. If you then bend your torso, neck and head to look "straight down" at a ball at your feet, you will notice that the ball will not come into view until your face is flat above the ground, with chin and forehead at the same level. That is -- if your want your eyes directly vertically above the ball. If you position your eyes not above the ball but above a spot back inside from the ball and then lower your level spyglass by bending down to look with a straight-out gaze, you will bring the ball into view at a point BEFORE the forehead gets level with the chin, but your gaze will still be straight out of the face, just not vertical to the surface.
When the eye muscles move the eyeballs inside the head, there are different patterns that the brain uses to "watch" or "look" around. One is to shift the eyes abruptly from one direction of looking to another. this is called a "saccade" or "saccadic vision." When you do this, the brain "shoots" the eyeballs from looking here to looking there very fast, and your brain does not register or see anything in between -- it's like flipping channels on the television with the remote control. First you have one view and then (in the blink of an eye) your eyes shoot to look at something else over there. This is the normal and most common way we "look around." The main other way is for the eyes to smoothly follow something moving in space -- like watching a butterfly flit around several meters off, or watching a ball roll slowly past along the ground. This is called "smooth pursuit" movement of the eyes. Smooth pursuit either moves the eyes alone while the head stays still so the head-eyes relation changes totally by eye change, or moves the head only while the eyes stay still so the head-eye relation stays constant, or a nicely coordinated combination of the two with both the head and the eyes jointly moving but their relationship changing all the while.
In targeting, the whole point is to relate the body to a location in space for the purpose of taking action to that target. In putting, the senses (not just vision) relate the body to the perceived necessary putt along the surface to the hole (straight or curving path) for the purpose of making the appropriate stroke that rolls the ball all the way to and into the hole. Some uses of the eyes are better than others for this sort of targeting.
In particular, saccadic vision is not that great, and the in comparison the sort of vision that uses smooth pursuit and keeps the eye-head relation steady is better. In relating the body to a target, the first job is to take stock of the body's position in space. That means using vision and body sense and balance to get a handle on where and how you are standing in a scene such as a golf green. The neck and trunk muscles and nerves tell the brain where your body is facing and your head aimed. Your sense of balance from the inner ear and the way your muscles and joints respond to gravity and slope tell you how your head is oriented in space with respect to gravity. Your eye muscles tell you how your eyes are aimed in reference to the base position of the body and head just described. Finally, what enters your eyeballs and registers as vision is THEN processed to get a handle on where objects are away from your body in the environment and how they are positioned in relation to your body and other locations and objects in the scene (near, far, closer, in front of, behind, obscuring, above, below, beside of, and so forth).
The reason saccadic vision is not that great is because, mainly, your brain deliberately ignores the "in between" here and there when the eyeballs shoot from one orientation to the next. The eyes "jump" from this gaze to that (that's what "saccade" means -- "jumpy looking"). This is true not only in looking from the ball itself to the hole on a straight putt, in which there is first a "snapshot" vision of the ball and then abruptly the eyes shoot over to the hole and then there is a "snapshot" vision of the hole with nothing in between actually seen, but it is also true in "hunting" along the ground between the ball and hole for the "line." What your eyes do in this "hunting" the line action is give you a string of "snapshots" of the ground in the vicinity of every two or three feet along the way. Each snapshot is like a square photo in a sense, and these photo snapshots don't really align themselves neatly edge to edge, but are sort of twisted out of order as you move from one to the next in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. You are hoping to see the straightness itself, not the ground, but instead you see snapshots of the ground every two or three feet, and NOT the straightness of the putt's path.
Another reason saccadic vision is not that great is that the jump of the gaze from here to there depends on what you mean by "there" and how the brain determines what "there" to jump the gaze to, as well as whether the brain does an accurate job when it actually jumps. "There" is determined, roughly speaking, in two main ways: something moving in the periphery attracts your attention, and the location of this object in the periphery is used to "program" the eye muscles movement from here to there, or you "remember" an earlier location in the scenery and use this memory to program the move from what you are currently gazing at to the recalled location "there." Obviously, you once were gazing at the "there" but have since moved on to other things, so every remembered location that guides a saccadic jump only exists in the context of other memories and movements of the eyes.
And, as noted, there is an issue just how accurate saccades are anyway. When a wasp enters your field of view off to the side of your gaze, your saccade to this moving object is directed by how the shape excites the eye receptors in the back of your eyeballs that are aiming off to the side. When you look with the eyes, the receptors at the back of the eyeball that are struck by light coming "straight in" the lens into the inside of the eyeball are called "cones" and they are tightly concentrated in a small region directly in the center of the back of the eyeball called the fovea. Off to the sides inside the back of the eyeball are "rods", and light from different areas in space that send light into the eye from off the gaze hit these various rods. Hold your fingertip directly out in front and use your cones to examine your fingerprints in detail. Then keep the gaze the same and move the fingertip slowly to the side of your gaze (don't follow with your eyes). The focus of the image of the fingertip will blur as the finger moves out of central vision (called "central vision" or "foveal vision"). The rods are not there for seeing detail but for seeing movement. Hence, between a wasp coming into your peripheral field of view and remebering a prior gaze direction, your "saccades" are more accurate in jumping to the wasp. Afterall, that's what the rods are for and the wasp is actually there right now telling your brain exactly where to send the eyeballs. In comparison, a remembered gaze direction is not as accurate, and most of the time when you shift the eyes from here to a remembered location, the saccades miss the target and simply get the target inside a big view and then you make more jumps to correct and get the gaze really onto the target.
So, using the smooth pursuit movement of the head only that keeps the gaze direction steady and keeps the eye-head relation steady allows you to scan along the in between on the ground. The straightness of the relationship between body, ball, and target comes from STARTING OUT in the smooth pursuit head movement with the GAZE straight out of the face. Then the head can be moved in a way that reliably and accurately draws the line of vision in a smooth straight line from here to there -- exactly what your body needs to learn in order to putt accurately.
If the head with a straight-out gaze is positioned so that the eyes are vertically above the ball to start, then the direction of gaze will necessarily be vertical too, and the face will be "flat" above the ball (chin and forehead at the same height). If you wear glasses, the side pieces would point straight down. If you wear a cap with the bill on right, the bill will point straight down.
To position the head and eyes this way over the ball, one first starts by "looking out to sea" with good posture to get a sense of the "aim spot" as if you were looking thru a tube or spyglass with your dominant eye. Then you bend until the aim spot is centered on the ball. This makes your head flat. When the head is flat, the axis of rotation thru the neck and out the top of your head is also "flat" or parallel to the ground. You can then TURN the head about this axis while keeping the axis steady (top of head stays in same spot in space while you turn), and also keep the gaze straight ahead and in the same relation to the head as in smooth pursuit (version 2 above). This turning of the cylinder-plus-eyes of the head will trace or draw the end of your line of vision straight along the ground and show you the "straightness" you need to see. Moreover, it will run your eyes along a straight path that is aimed parallel to the way your two shoulders are aimed, so that happens to be the way your putting stroke is most likely and desirably going to send the ball away along. As the head turns, the top of the axis in the center top of your head stays in one place as the chin turns up and left (for a right-hander) in such a fashion that the chin remains always the same distance from the line of the shoulderframe. That is one of the main ways you know that your head is getting turned correctly so your line of sight keeps heading in a straight line. There are others, such as the view of straightness along the ground as the line of sight moves along. If the view is not straight, you can simply see and notice that fact and realize your head turn is getting out of whack and your "plane of vision" is not staying vertical in the vertical plane of the putt's startline. Another way you can tell is that the view of the front-most eye is being accuratly followed shortly after by the view of the behind-eye as the head turn progresses and the nose clears out of the way of the behind-eye's view of the ground. There are still other ways to monitor this. I call this gaze pattern of "targeting" the relationship between the ball, the path, and the target the "Ferris Wheel" gaze, because the two eyes are carried from the bottom of a vertically oriented wheel left and upward like two gondolas on a Ferris Wheel.
If you setup with the eyes indside and back from the ball, you can still look at the ball straight out of the face, but the Ferris Wheel of the head will be tilted back off vertical like a "Tilta-Whirl" ride at the Fair. This gaze pattern still allows a head turn to the target that sweeps the line of vision straight along the ground, but is not as good as the Ferris Wheel pattern because it is missing a few cues that help you make sure it is done properly without deceiving or deluding you about where the target really is.
So, that is the "gaze" that I am discussing. The typical pattern of modern golfers is to use "saccades" because they don't know about all this. Indeed, some people actually think the saccades are good simply because so many people use them, including golfers who do better than other golfers. That does not mean it is best or even better than some other patterns, however, specifically the straight-gaze patterns (Ferris Wheel or Tilta-Wheel). The real reason these golfers use saccades is because of the direction out of the face of their gazes to start with over the ball -- not straight out the face but angled down the cheeks as if reading a book. When the golfer starts with this gaze direction and THEN STARTS TURNING THE HEAD toward the target trying to "see the straightness" in between, the gaze carries the line of sight off to the left or inside of a straight line in a curling fashion -- very farr off line, and farther the more the head turns. This REQUIRES the golfer to use his eye muscles to re-find the "line" he wants because he knows he's not gazing along a straight line. the eyes are then constantly jumping back onto a supposed line somewhere and then curling left back off of it and jumping back sort of to the line as the head continues to turn. This of course is a poor way to teach your body where the target is and how to get there in a straight line along the ground. And golfers kind of figure this out the more they play, so more experienced golfers just don't bother a lot of trying to see the in-between straightness from beside the ball. Instead, they try to see the line from behind the ball and then setup beside the ball and forget about the in-between, and use a saccade that jumps all the way from the ball TOWARD the hole, if not precisely AT and TO the hole (since saccades aren't that accurate). The jump to the hole is based on the golfer's memory of where the hole is located, and this memory is a layered amalgam of all the different ways the golfer has been looking while moving around on the green. Some of these layers are stale, and some conflict with others, and some actually change a bit over time or morph a little, so the whole process of getting the memory of the location in place to make the saccade in the first place is not that reliable in comparison to the Ferris Wheel or even the Tilta-Whirl. Even so, by the time the golfers use the remembered location plus corrective gaze shifts to really center the target, they have at least "looked" directly at the target from their relativelty stable body position. So this works after a fashion to teach the body where the target is in relation to the body for the purpose of action of putting the ball to the target -- it's just not as reliable and consistent as the Ferris Wheel or Tilta-Whirl pattern.
And over time, the consistency of the way in which you target -- the actual physical movements you use to teach your body -- are the basis for fine-tuning your skills. No consistency in physical procedures, no sharpening of targeting skills over time.
You can see more about this, including a drwaing of the field of view and "aim spot", in my Tip "Putt Out Your Eyes",
http://puttingzone.com/MyTips/eye.html, and "Gaze Dead Straight for Dead Aim", at
http://puttingzone.com/MyTips/gaze.html. To see more about the head-eye position at address above the ball, take a look at my SetUps collection of photos in the Gallery section of the website,
http://puttingzone.com/setup.html.
--
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
"Just whistle and I'll come running."
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