The people building Ashta
Ashta separates vision, participation, methodology, and independent review. Its founder and confirmed advisors are below; independent reviewers are named only once each has confirmed in writing.
Founders & advisors
Adrian Taffinder is the founder of the Ashta Project — an international speaker and practitioner specialising in deep subconscious behavioural psychology and emotional reprogramming. He is the creator of Subconscious Surgery™, a method for shifting a person's emotional relationship to their experience and the conditioned subconscious beliefs that drive their triggers. With Ashta, his aim is to take the modalities he has spent over a decade using in private practice and put them under honest, instrumented test — measuring whether inner-development work produces real, measurable change using voice and acoustic analytics, heart-rate variability, and an expanding panel of objective markers, and publishing what the data shows, including the null results. He is driven by one question: of everything the self-development and consciousness world offers, what actually works — and how would you prove it?
Dr Gino Yu received his BS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1987 and 1993). He has taught at the University of Southern California and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and in 1999 established the Multimedia Innovation Centre at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Entertainment and Game Development and founder of M-Lab. His research applies media technologies to cultivate creativity and consciousness. He founded the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association, the Consciousness, Science & Technology Conference, and the Asia Consciousness Festival, and has hosted events including TEDxHongKong, Wikimania, and Toward a Science of Consciousness. He advises a number of leading-edge ventures, including SingularityNET and Hanson Robotics.
In conversation: Ashta's founder, Adrian Taffinder, talks with Dr Gino Yu about consciousness, human development, and creativity.
Interview: "Exploring Consciousness, Development, and Human Potential" — Adrian Taffinder with Dr Gino Yu. ID: tYGzm2NjIJQ
Thomas Joseph Brown is a natural philosopher and independent researcher who has spent over four decades at the frontier of contested, unorthodox science — the kind of claim Ashta exists to test rather than take on faith. As Director and Editor of the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation from 1985 to 1995, he edited fifty issues of the Journal of Borderland Research and published and edited the work of the researcher Trevor James Constable. His current work, published as the Chronicles of Alkemix, examines the geometry and structure of water and the Goethean tradition of observing the living world. What he brings to Ashta is the explorer's end of an honest panel: a rare, deep working knowledge of the contested natural-philosophy traditions our experiment programme puts under blinded, pre-registered test — held with an empiricist's discipline rather than a believer's faith, the same instinct that has a Sheldrake test a claim rather than assert it. A lifelong explorer of these questions adds as much as a lifelong sceptic; each carries what the other lacks, and both want the honest truth more than they want to be right. Ashta presents those traditions as hypotheses under investigation, not established science; Thomas's role is advisory and scoped accordingly. His work →
A further advisor is joining the project. Their full name, photograph, and bio will be published here once confirmed in writing.
Independent reviewers
Named when confirmed
Statisticians, experimental psychologists, research ethicists, at least one declared sceptic, and rigorous explorers of the contested review each protocol before data collection. The panel is built to span that full range on purpose: the sceptic and the explorer each see what the other misses, and both are bound by the single commitment that defines Ashta — wanting the honest truth more than wanting to be right. Full names, affiliations, photographs, and signed conflict-of-interest disclosures will be published here as each confirms — not before. We would rather show an empty space than a name we haven't earned the right to print.
What advisors do — and do not do
Advisors may review specific protocols, statistical approaches, privacy policies, or interpretation standards. They do not control Ashta, guarantee results, or endorse claims outside their stated scope. No reviewer is compensated on study outcomes. Affiliations, where shown, are for identification only; Ashta is not affiliated with or endorsed by any named institution.
