The fMRI data detects “activity” but not the kind of activity. So it doesn’t really tell us what is doing what in the brain.
And it certainly does not discredit Taylor and MCGilchrist wholesale.
Then I notice that Buddhists have always distinguished between “thinking” and awareness. This could be a hemisphere issue.
“Thinking is one of the main difficulties we encounter while learning to meditate. Most of us have lived so much of our lives in our heads that it comes as a beautiful gift to be fully aware of the vividness of internal sensations and stimuli from the external world as they impact the senses. The early Buddhist texts make a clear distinction between two principal kinds of thought. The first type of thought is called vitakka-vicâra (directed thought (vitakka) and evaluation (vicâra).) Another very different kind of thinking is papañca, “proliferation”. It is obsessive thought, strings of associations that run on and on, fantasy and concept formation that lead the mind away from things just as they are experienced. Papañca is the monkey mind of Zen imagery.
The state that is the final goal of Buddhism is beyond language, but Buddhist texts say that the careful, clear use of language - Right Speech - is indispensable along the way. Takuan’s “sound of no sound” will not be lost through a meditative investigation into the nature of thought. In fact, learning to understand the origin of those many voices which vibrate within the ear leads us back to it.”
So, introspection raises the issue of hemisphere usage. But introspection also raises the issue of trauma imprints. So I think I will start a separate topic of introspection.