To exercise mesmerism on; to spellbind; to enthrall. 1913, Joseph C. Lincoln, chapter 4, in Mr. Pratt's Patients: Then he commenced to talk, really talk. and inside of two flaps of a herring's fin he had me mesmerized, like Eben Holt's boy at the town hall show. He talked about the ills of humanity, and the glories of health and Nature and service and land knows what all.
White matter develops and changes across our life span in a pattern strikingly different from gray matter. We do not complete the formation of brain myelin until many years after birth, perhaps past 20 years of age; by contrast, we have our full complement of brain neurons at birth.
The cortex of the brain which contains nerve cell bodies. The gray matter is in contrast to the white matter, the part of the brain that contains myelinated nerve fibres. The gray matter is so named because it in fact appears gray. The white matter is white because that is the colour of myelin, the insulation covering the nerve fibres.