The burn morel mushroom doesn’t fruit when conditions are good.

It waits, dormant underground, until a wildfire clears away the competition, and then it blooms by the hundreds.

This week, science journalist Pragathi Ravi explores what that survival strategy has to say about ADHD, focus, and why some brains need the field cleared before they can do their best work.

Let’s go.

▶ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube!

Every week, we help 41,976+ humans understand and unfuck the rapidly changing world around us.
Join us or else.

Every week, I ask our podcast guest, "What’s a book you’ve read this year that’s opened your mind to a topic you haven’t considered before, or that’s changed your thinking in some way?"

And every week, we add their picks to a list on Bookshop, where every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores.

Want an ad-free experience? Become a Member!

Ten years ago, the Great Smoky Mountains lived up to their name.

A fire crept up the steep terrain, where unusually high winds sent smoke billowing up its vertical cliffs and burned 11,000 acres of what was a popular hiking spot. Named the Chimney Tops 2 wildfire, the raging flames licked at red spruce, yellow birch and rhododendron trees until their bark split and all that was left was a heap of sooty ash. 

The fire quelled all signs of life in the mountain, except for one.

In the following years, Daniel Bruce Raudabaugh traversed the charred landscapes. As a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s plant biology department, he was looking for something specific, something that had evaded his line of sight for the longest time.

Pragathi is a science journalist based in New York. Her writing has appeared in GRIST, Inside Climate News, New Lines magazine and Christian Science Monitor, to name a few.

@pragathi_r24 | pragathiravi.com

“It's interesting because they blend in and are hard to see; however, once you see one, the rest just pop out,” adds the current assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, where Raudabaugh specializes in mycology, microbiology, genetics and other classes.

Through the ground that once blazed for five days straight, he found Morchella exuberans, a fire-associated fungal species.

This species of the burn morel mushroom is endemic to conifer burn sites across the Northern Hemisphere, which means its olive-green, ridged caps likely surface after the fire has left its mark.

The burn morel species have puzzled scientists and delighted foragers for years.

Fungi of the Morchella genus emerge in large numbers in the first year after the fire, explaining why Raudabaugh found them by the hundreds. But experts admit they know little about what specifically causes them to fruit after a fire disturbance, though they have some ideas. 

“Morels are members of the Ascomycota (sac fungi), and the part that people eat is the sexual fruiting body, which is producing spores,” says Raudabaugh.

When the spores germinate, they produce hyphae. Depending on the species, some species will use their hyphae to form associations with roots. The mycelium that makes up the fungi underground lives symbiotically with roots of nearby trees, exchanging nutrients in a relationship that sustains both. But when the trees die, the morels’ supply is severed.

Fungi in the boreal forests are fire-adapted; they possess thick-walled sclerotia that allow them to survive environmental extremes, lying dormant until conditions change.

Raudabaugh notes that some morel species require disturbances such as fire, logging, and windstorms to fruit at all. But the field holds contentions: while fruiting does not require a fire event, it is frequently enhanced by one. 

“Much of what is actually going on is still unknown, but there is some evidence that the high heat from the fire penetrates the soil layers and "wakes up" dormant spores in the soil,” states Raudabaugh.

“We don’t know the trigger yet,” says Ari Jumpponen, an expert in fungal ecology at the University of Kansas. But he also admits that the research community knows relatively little about the triggers and what drives these systems.

“The bottom line is that morels fruit when winter snow has melted, the soil is beginning to warm, and the air is still humid,” other scientists state. Some believe the raging fire killed all the organisms competing for nutrients, giving these slow-growing fungi their moment in the sun. 

For me, this struck close to home.

It got me thinking about my elusive focus that flits whimsically between the tasks in front of me, often spreading itself a mile wide and an inch deep. However, the arrival of a deadline often means my focus is razor-sharp and my motivation effusive. The urgency, in some ways, quells my ability to be distracted. 

For years, this behavior has meant that I cannot reliably depend on myself to finish the task at hand.

In her practice, Katya Rubia has seen several such cases. The cognitive neuroscientist and professor at King's College London has spent the last 35 years imaging Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) brains.

Her response to my frustrations was that, for my brain, it was a function of dopamine. 

People with ADHD struggle with inattention, where keeping on a task or staying organized is harder for them than for most people. They tend to have low levels of dopamine, a “feel-good” neurotransmitter linked to motivation and reward, and tend to get bored more easily. For them, tasks appear less salient— they are not prominent or interesting enough to cut through the noise. 

“(But) if you give them a reward, things become more salient,” she points out, which is what the deadline did for me. 

By attaching a reward to a particular task, that task becomes more prominent. The reward, in the form of a deadline, eliminates the competition, which means the rest of the tasks fall out of my focus.

Rubia has seen this pattern among the children with ADHD that she works with. “If you like a task, you’re more likely to do it,” she points out. 

The burn morel encounters something similar.

Researchers have found that the high temperatures accompanied by a fire increase alkalinity in the soil, altering its pH value and reducing microbial load, so that the morels don’t have to compete as much. This favors the pyrophilous fungi, those that thrive after fire. 

Fungi use chemistry and physical properties to sense their environment, so these are proposed cues they use to determine that a fire has occurred, and it's time to become active. 

“When the surface temperatures reach several hundred degrees Celsius, very few things—if any— survive that,” Jumpponen explains.

The fungal richness in the immediate area of the fire dropped by almost 60%, while bacteria dropped by 70%. The morels capitalize on this vacant spot. 

“Think about billions of microbes in the soil, all taking up space and eating the resources,” Raudabaugh says. When the dormant morels wake up, they then need to compete for space already occupied by other microorganisms and fight for food. 

But a fire causes the soil to get so hot and kill most of the microorganisms off. This now opens up space for morels to occupy, relatively free of competition for both space and resources.

I can relate; my tasks fight off inattention while vying for my focus. 

This is governed by the salience network, which refers to a set of brain regions that work towards deciding when one’s attention should be directed. Despite the saliency in tasks, the brain is expected to prioritize tasks and regulate one’s attention. But interactions between these systems are weaker for people with ADHD. 

While the morel waits for the blaze to clear away the contending organisms, my attention waits until there is a deadline that wipes out the non-essential tasks, creating space for what it deems rewarding.

This is a distinction that my brain understands, and doesn’t have to wrestle with. That space that the fire creates, for me, the deadline or reward serves the same role. 

For the morels and the brain diagnosed with ADHD, the world is where too many contenders are crowding their paths.

For the morels, this looks like a forest floor brimming with organisms, vying for their share of nutrients.

For the brain, it can be a myriad of equally important or unimportant tasks, which fail to drum up enough interest to pursue them. 

I have always compared my brain to the way that others meticulously tick off their to-do list; I have long envied that systematic precision. But the morel doesn’t grow in the general environment either. It waits until the conditions are exactly right.

A teaspoon of soil contains about 6.2 miles of hyphae. As foragers stride across acres of newly burned soil, their footfalls muffled by soot, they are traversing hundreds of morels potentially about to fruit.

Come next spring, the ground will play host to several morel caps that are ripe for picking.

Attention, when it finally arrives, feels like that— a long-awaited visitor. 

👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in Life Finds A Way right here.

We’re 100% independent and proudly supported by readers like you.

Members get a 30 day free trial to:

Check out what else we make (or take it easy on the emails, we get it) right in your Subscriber Preferences.

Life Finds A Way is published one Friday per month.