The whole time I'm saying that the Bible doesn't say that the head is associated with thoughts and feelings - though it does say that when talking about the heart, liver, belly and bowels.
And I've already explained why your perception of Biblical semantics is problematic in a sense that you don't really know what these people where thinking, and you seem to be assuming that the nature of perception as it's localized "in our head" isn't an obvious first assumption that people generally make purely based on personal experience.
You have to at least understand that you are attempting to force the language of that specific cultural setting to have continuum with ours in a way that relates to literal understanding of reality.
Today we also say "Go with your gut feeling", and "follow your heart". as you yourself say...
Or it can mean "the central or innermost part of something" (similar to the position of our hearts)
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner
Jesus could have used "head" or "mind" when talking about understanding rather than using "heart". Why did he say "heart"? Just because he wanted to go along with the popular (incorrect) belief of the time?
No, because language encapsulates semantics. For example, we say can you "turn the lights off", when we are not turning anything, and off is not what we actually doing to the light. That's not proper scientific relationships between the light and the electric circuit.
Thus, you can't say that we are living in a scientifically illiterate culture because we think we can literally "turn the light on", whatever that would mean.
So we have all sorts of these. "Take a picture", "Start a car", "Rewind a movie", "play a song" .... there are tons of verbal cues that we use that have nothing to do with how things actually work, but we understand these ok.
So, if you can't assume that simply because you read some linguistic phrase out of cultural context, it necessitates that such culture understood that phrase literally. We can only assume what these cultures understood by these phrases, because in some cases, Biblical narrative itself is one of the very few surviving literary works of that era.