Meaning Of Gripped In Context

Passage 1

Writers and other artists have practical motives for wondering how best to make imaginary things seem convincing. In the 1790s, for instance, Samuel Taylor Coleridge set out to write a series of poems about "persons and characters supernatural." To do so, he knew, he had to make the fantastical seem credible—"to procure for these shadows of imagination," he wrote, in a soon-to-be-famous phrase, a "willing suspension of disbelief." Coleridge was excellent at inducing a suspension of disbelief. That is why we are as gripped by "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as the wedding guest within the poem who cannot tear himself away from the sailor's tale—even though the tale is an outrageous one involving a magical albatross.

Passage 2

For understanding the willing suspension of disbelief, what matters is the great expansion of the prefrontal cortex, evolutionarily the last part of humans' brains to develop, the part just above our eyebrows and foreheads. It is in that region that we do our most complex planning, and most importantly, it is there that we inhibit actions. When we say we do not act in reaction to works of art, it is our prefrontal cortex that is shutting down our propensity to act and, with it, our awareness of body and environment and our testing of reality. But what is not shut down is our corticolimbic system, which is generating emotions. We can feel real emotions toward unreal fictions because the two different brain systems are at work.

As used in Passage 1, "gripped" most nearly means