Humanistic approaches prioritize interpretation, understanding, and qualitative methods, focusing on the particularities of individuals and societies. In contrast, scientific perspectives emphasize explanation, prediction, generalization, and quantitative methods. Quantification has become particularly relevant in general medicine, which has advanced through genomic and epigenomic studies as well as exposome research. However, psychiatry has struggled to achieve similar progress because of the complexity of psychiatric disorders due to high heterogeneity, polygenicity, and epigenetic and multifarious environmental influences. The latter challenge is particularly reflected in the limited efficacy of pharmacotherapy. For instance, patient-level data revealed that the remission rate of patients undergoing antidepressant treatment is only 35%. Personalized psychiatry has promised to narrow the gap in diagnosis, intervention, and prevention between psychopathologies and somatic diseases. To this end, the emerging approach of pharmacogenomics has gained momentum examining genetic variations to predict drug response and improve treatment. Pharmacogenomics clearly follows the scientific tradition of quantification, generalization, and prediction. So far, the utility of personalized pharmacotherapy and pharmacogenomics has remained limited without reliably identifying the optimal psychiatric medication for individual patients. This limitation might be tied to its focus on quantitative approaches and measurable biological variability.
Recently, seminal studies have shown that treatment outcome using antidepressants depends on the quality of the living environment mediated by an increase of context-driven neuroplasticity. This re-conceptualization provides a qualitative explanation of the variable clinical effectiveness of psychotherapeutic drugs and highlights the potential for enhancing treatment by addressing environmental factors using a humanistic perspective.

By revisiting Leonardo and Descartes from an interdisciplinary perspective that links the traditional history of science and contemporary systems neuroscience, a philosophical process of dissection of the mind and its narrative techniques, brought to fruition by Descartes, is established as an effort to separate predictively superior and disembodied reason from passionate and illusory bodily feelings. This Cartesian legacy, although still hegemonic in the scientific imagination, is now challenged by growing scientific evidence that reclaims the place of the body and, with it, the senses, imagination, and subjective transits that strengthen and amplify the axial aspects of our rational narratives as embodied cognition. We argue that the perceptual, affective, and cognitive foundations that underpin the general complex human experience with objective and intersubjective worlds apply to the appreciation of objects of scientific interest, thus also exercised at the expense of multimodal neurobiological resources, including those traditionally correlated with human subjectivity. In doing so, we call for some conceptual reinterpretations of aesthesis, updated here to account for the complex nature of perceptual construction, from multisensory readings to motor action, including affective engagement and cognition. The mental resources accessible to the scientist are discussed and proposed as central to a still emerging neuroepistemology, with consequences for the epistemic foundations of the History of Science. Insights into the underlying processes of creative thinking and creative science that have permeated science since the beginning of time will also be shared.