CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- In last Sunday's column, I shared the news that I was leaving my position at the newspaper. I was perhaps a bit long-winded in getting to the part (511 words into a 627-word column, to be exact) where I said that despite working somewhere new, I would continue writing my column.

This I realized after getting a large number of very nice e-mails and calls from those whose total reading attention I'd apparently lost somewhere earlier on in my story. Skim-reading is something I do myself, the result of frequent interruptions or attempting to read while waiting for the microwave to beep or the toast to pop up.

So to those who thought last Sunday's column was my last, I apologize.

It's going to be hard to miss me when I won't go away.

I once had a boss, a transplant from a big city, who would regularly interrupt those who came to his office by saying, "Bottom-line me here. Boil it down to one sentence."

The first few times I heard that, I cringed, but I soon grew accustomed to his efficient manner of cutting through small talk. I even came to appreciate the honesty behind what he was asking: Tell me quick, or you're going to lose me. He recognized he had a short attention span and found a way to make it work for him.

When talking with most men, I've found it's often best to leave out the reasoning behind what you want and the argument for their cooperation and just get to the meat of the matter. Most women, however, want a bit more. We crave reasoning. We want the whole story. Get right to the meat of the matter with women and they'll think you abrupt or discourteous. It seems one of the many differences with how our brains process things.

At least that's what I thought. The part of last Sunday's column where I mentioned the Coffee would continue seemed to be equally missed by both women and men, so I did some online research to see whom we could blame. Turns out it's our brain.

Alejandro Lleras, an assistant professor in psychology, has been studying how past experiences affect what people notice, and what they unconsciously disregard as if it were never seen at all.

In his study, he found that if a person is told "to find the picture of a face among flashing images of 20 houses, the brain will create a bias against images of houses so it can spot the face." If that person is then asked to find the picture of a house among flashing images of faces, they're more likely to miss the house because of lingering bias from the previous test. It's how the brain sorts as it searches.

It's why something can be right there in front of you, yet you don't see it. The brain, affected by previous events, creates biases against certain images it deems distracting. The condition, known by researchers as "change blindness," has relevance in everyday life, especially to those whose jobs require systematic searches, like with luggage screening or computer commands.

Apparently, looking directly at something doesn't guarantee you will see it. It's a trick of the eyes, a sleight of hand of the brain.

So to those whose own body parts earlier prevented them from catching the news, I'm now gone from the paper, but Smell the Coffee isn't going away.

Reach Karin Fuller at karinful...@gmail.com, and visit her blog at blogs.wvgazette.com/karinfuller.