Dear Wade,
I don't believe eye dominance causes the pulls. Rather, pulls are caused by body positioning and movement -- something in the motion of your body during targeting or stroking is "causing" the pulls.
To jump straight the bottom line, my answer is that #2) of your options is probably best, but it may be a stroke movement flaw. There are three big candidates other than eye dominance as the culprit.
In targeting, you seem to be using a head turn motion that "gets your nose out of the way" when looking towards the target. This motion would tend to cant the nase of your neck off square to an "open" orientation to the line of the putt and your setup in the hips and feet. This twisting out of square of the base of the neck also tends to twist the shoulder frame open, perhaps no more than 1/2 an inch. This promotes a pull.
Another possibility is that your stroke motion thru impact and beyond is plauged by the very common flaw of the left elbow staying near the left hip instead of separating as the shoulder rock proceeds vertically upward propelling the putter head straight thru the impact area. This is partly the result of habitual behaviors overruling the learned artificiality needed for putting, but it may also be an unconscious relaxing of the steady tension that keeps the "triangle" shape intact at a time when the hands are being moved by the shoulder rock further from the feet than would naturally occur. This results in the hands dropping around to the inside, which is a pull if it is allowed to happen before the putter-ball period of contact is concluded (usually after about two or three inches).
And the third possibility is a subtle rotating of either the left or right forearm that twists the orientation of the hands and hence the putter face closed (counterclockwise looking down). This is handsiness in the movement of the putter. "Reaching" out to a point in space away from the feet a bit to where the hands ought to end up at the top of the thru-stroke is habitually accompanied by an alignment of the plane of the palm as if you were going to "point" to the target location or were going to offer a "handshake" to this location. That is a rotation of the hand that closes the putter face. If I asked you to "put your left hand where it will end up" in the stroke, to fill that future space with your hand, you would likely just put the hand over there mostly with the elbow moving the forearm and hand into position. But this is not good enough, as this twists the forearm closed, and closes the face of the putter. In the thru-stroke, then, you have to practice deliberately keeping the hands "dead" by disallowing any change in orientation in the stroke, especially the thru-stroke. One trick I use is to deliberately tighten the "squeeze" in the left hand between the thumb pad and the pad beneath the second finger to set a "line" of muscle tension in my hand on the flat-top putter handle like holding a fountain pen that has the shape of a long thin box. I then make sure this "box" inside the left hand's grip does not alter orientation during the stroke. Essentially, it forces me to move ONLY with the shoulders and this keeps the hands "dead."
With regard to your suggestion that eye dominance is the problem, your descriptive passage of the struggle with this issue runs thru quite a vegetable garden of issues, so let me go slowly in this response. To save time and space, I'll bracket my comments as your passage goes along.
You write:
"Recently I have again been working on eliminating a pull which has plagued me all my golfing life. My right eye is domimant and if I putt left handed, I don't pull." [Because there is no flawed head turn looking to the right, as there is no need to get the nose out of the way?]
"I have putted left handed but find that eventually lining the putt and putting the line becomes very uncomfortable visually." [May be because you don't start with the dominant eye behind the ball before looking right, to be able to connect the dots of ball and target? This caused Nicklaus to cock his head at address in order to start with the dominant lead-side eye backed up a bit to get it behind the ball. Maybe you should put left-handed with a cocked head and the right dominant eye backed up behind the ball a wee bit, or try standing a touch open to the target -- a tip I often give left-eye dominant golfers putting right handed.]
"No matter how much I try, when I putt right handed, I eventually begin to pull the ball. Moving the ball back in my stance, more under the dominant right eye, helps in the short term but produces some visual discomfort and I still pull the putts, always at the most inopportune times." [Moving the ball back in the stance shouldn't have much effect if the stroke is straight back and straight thru, but will promote pushing if the stroke is arcing inside to inside. Even with a straight path, though, if you are "late" getting to the bottom of the stroke in your pendulum action, my experience is that being late to the bottom sends the ball to the right. I don't fully understand this and am working on clarifying it. But you may be getting some better results temporarily by this moving of the ball back, but due to some flaws in your stroke, and not because it improves the eye dominance situation.]
"Recently I bought an eye patch at the local pharmacy for a couple of dollars and began to use it. If I patch the dominant right eye and putt right handed, I don't pull. If I take the patch off, I look around my nose with my dominant eye, unknowingly open my shoulders slightly and pull. It is insidious." [Head turn shifting base of neck and shoulders out of square? Patching the right eye obviates the need to get the nose out of the way.]
"I do some activities with my left eye dominant. I lived with my grandparents as a child. I had an uncle who also lived with us who was some 15 years older than me and left handed. He, of course, was my hero and I tried to emulate his left handedness. I lived with a red rubber banded slingshot in my hip pocket and learned to fire it lefthanded with a dominant left eye. I still shoot a slingshot lefthanded and left eyed. This leads me to believe that eye dominance is a learned skill. I wonder if, at my age of age 67, I can learn to be more left eye dominant when putting?" [Sure you can, but it probably wouldn't help. Eye dominance occurs from the brain's necessity to choose one gaze direction only for the limited purpose of sighting at a target with visual focus on the target. The "picking" has been occuring throughout your life. Eye dominance does seem to shift somewhat and is not as fixed and definite as most people think. For example, there is evidence that whichever eye is closest to a target the person plans to sight onto, that eye gains in dominance, and other evidence similarly suggests that whichever direction the action of the body will go tends also to be the side with the boosted eye dominance. And sharpshooting rifles often requires learning a new eye dominance behavior for that specific context / activity. And many athletes in "open-field" sports (e.g., football, hockey) are so often faced with moving left and looking right or moving right and looking left that they tend to sight more with the middle of their forehead than one eye or the other. Regardless, though, eye dominance in targeting from beside the ball is about connecting one eye's gaze from the head to a line on the ground. Once the gaze is set straight out of the face, the gaze is set. The rest (keeping the line of sight on the line on the ground from ball to target) is up to the head turn motion. I frequently practice putting left-handed just to use the left eye in this manner, and a straight left-eye gaze is just as good and no different from a right-eye gaze - so long as the gaze is kept straight out of the face and the head turn motion is correct. The focus needs to be on the head turn, not which eye's gaze is set straight.]
"I have 3 options, as I see it:
1.) Learn to become more left eye dominant,
2.) learn to look under my nose, rather than around my nose or
3.) learn to putt left handed
4.) Accept missed putts to the left of the hole,
5.) etc."
[That's why I choose option 2) above.]
"I have read your Tips section on eye dominance. I have found a site on the internet which alludes to eye dominance being a learned skill. You might find this interesting as well.
Hawkeen Training Comments ?"
The Hawkeen Training site is discussing binocular rivalry and stereoscopic vision. Viewing two different side-by-side images cross-eyed causes the mind to "choose" one reality and results in the mind switching or fluctuating from the left eye's view to the right eye's view. This phenomenon is called "binocular rivalry," a fluctuation of the brain's deciding which of the two views to credit as the "reality" to convey to the rest of the mind. The phenomenon is the basis for the Nekker Cube illusion (a wire cube 2-D drawing appears to be tilted toward you then away from you, alternating in the mind), and many other optical illusions. Here is a whole ton of research on binocular rivalry, if interested (from my Neuroscience section on the website):
Binocular Rivalry Bibliography
In contrast, cross-eyed viewing of two two-dimensional paired images (side-by-side) when both images have details from the same object as seen from different perspectives results in a fake three-dimensional stereoscopic sense that the object appears to us in 3D. This "Cyclopean Vision" is not using bionocular rivalry, but is using the fact that the two eye's gaze from two different locations in the head and stereoscopic vision results when the point of focus of both eyes delivers different details about the same object seen from different angles for assembly into a constructed sense of three-dimensional vision in the mind. You can place two images side by side and then cross your eyes to sort of shift both images inward until they overlap, and this gives an illusion of seeing in 3D. Bela Julesz at Rutgers studied this (so-called "Cyclopean Vision") to death for the military at bell Labs in the 1950s and 1960s, designing camoflague paint patterns and optical imaging patterns to reveal details from staellite and spy plane photos. It is also the trick behind Magic Eye stereograms.
Unfortunately, the sort of binocular rivalry and stereoscopic tricks discussed on the Hawkeen website don't relate to eye dominance for sighting. Obviously, BOTH eyes are used for stereopsis, and stereopsis depends on their being two different locations of the eyeball cameras. A stereoscopic camera is two lenses separated by a certain distance to produce two different viewing angles on the same scene. Dominant eye sighting is all about one eye's gaze only, and how the brain isolates that signal for purposes of spatial awareness about the body in space in relation to objects in the environment. It's not really about seeing the object; it's about orienting the body in space to the object.
Once the body is oriented to the line in setting up square, then the movement of the body (head turn) to orient to the target via scanning the line of sight along the line starts with using the dominant eye gazing straight out of the face down to the line, and this eye's line of sight is the one attended to as the head turn progresses with the gaze direction fixed and steady. But at this point, the head turn is the deal, not eye dominance, and any old eye will work fine.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
PuttingZone
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