There are more people working on it now. When I started working on it, there were only a handful of papers. There was a lot of stuff in the 70s, and then it all petered out, and then it resurged in the late 90s and early 2000s.

How it’s changed is that knowledge has advanced—when we started off, the cognitive effects were clear. We did a big review in 2008 of all the cognitive effects studies of hangover that existed and concluded from that that there was some evidence of long-term memory and attention deficits. But it was very muddy. Say there were six or seven studies that had looked at attention, five or so showed something and the other two didn’t. Science is never as clear cut as you think it’s going to be. But since then, there have been more studies done and there is now a clearer picture of attention and memory being affected. And one thing we’re trying to do in our study is to look in a bit more detail at what particular aspects of attention and memory are affected.

Another development is there’s a psychological function known as executive function – that’s our ability to think laterally and plan. It’s almost like the mind taking control of itself and saying “okay, where are we, what do we want to do next,” and deliberately planning actions known as executive functions. And that’s been very largely neglected in hangover research, even though there’s evidence that alcohol use affects executive function. So one thing we’re doing that is novel is to look in quite a lot of detail at hangover affects executive functioning.

Why are we still missing some knowledge about hangovers? Why do we still not know a lot about how they work?

Well, it’s still not a mainstream research topic, really. Most alcohol researchers are looking at the acute effects of alcohol or more direct questions around what leads to alcohol use disorder.

And the funding is still going towards more direct questions. One of the reasons we still don’t know much is because the research effort in this area is much less in this area than in other areas, and maybe rightly so. Maybe there are more pressing questions around alcohol that are being funded, but one thing about science is that you can never discount where the next big discovery is going to come from.

Do ever find that other scientists look down on you or judge you because you study something that’s related to a vice?

I think that’s probably one reason why hangover hasn’t been studied so much. I just think it’s been neglected for whatever reason. But some of us think it’s interesting, and we’re pursuing it.

What, to you, have been some of the most exciting breakthroughs in hangover science recently?

I think one of the best papers on hangover was one of Joris Verster’s papers on the causes of hangover. It really is a document of what we know about it. [Ed: Verster's paper systematically reviewed common hangover "cures" and found only a few to be supported by one or two studies. Still, Verster concluded that "the best way to avoid hangovers is practicing abstinence or moderate alcohol consumption."]