Interview with the creator of
Vantage Quest

Vantage Quest is the name of a project created by Carlisle Bergquist, a fellow Salinan (Kansas), and an expert in the field of brainwave synchronization.
I spent the afternoon with Carlisle and picked his brain about this fascinating subject and his interest in it.

What is your educational background? What brought you into this field?

Carlisle Bergquist: I have a BS degree in biology, and actually with that, I probably leaned a little bit more towards botany because I was into maybe landscaping, and from there went on and did a little bit of landscape architecture for graduate work but decided that had more to do with parking lots than it did with parks. So I didn't pursue that.
Then I went to John F. Kennedy University for a master's degree in transpersonal psychology. I then went ahead and got the California license, did all the internships for being a marriage and family counselor; now I guess they call it a marriage and family therapist.
Then I went on to Saybrook Institute (San Francisco), which is now called Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and went on for the doctorate. I'm not done with that because I got uprooted back to Kansas ... I completed everything except the final draft of the dissertation, like lots of people.
There again, it was in psychology, but that also was where I began to develop more ideas with not just transpersonal psychology and counseling, but also looking at some of the psychophysiology stuff because this fellow, Peter Parks, that was my good friend ... would come to our conferences and would have all these EEG charts that he and Elmer (Green) had just done of somebody, y'know, and it was, like, hmmm, this is pretty cool.
So one day, we were sitting out on the point of a bunch of rocks at a conference center at the Saybrook conclave, right on the tip of Monterey Peninsula ... Pebble Beach Golf Course is right there.
So we're sitting out on the tip and we're talking about all this stuff and I'm looking at the waves in the ocean, and I'm thinking, "Waves are waves, and if we have these waves happening here, and we have these waves happening in the brain, what's happening with the multiplicity of tones?"
And that was when the idea came to me that looking at the high-amplitude wave in Theta or Alpha was kind of like listening to an orchestra and only hearing the bass fiddle. So I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting to see if there's something more that correlates with that high-amplitude wave, like harmonics?
So that's where the idea about harmonics started. And my initial work was going to be to try to improve biofeedback, in that now we have visual stimuli that tells you that you're achieving what you need, you're producing that higher-amplitude wave in the target area, whatever that is; or we have auditory feedback ...now you're making Alpha or whatever. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be better if we fed back a note that was a harmonic correlate to the brainwave that's happening?"
Let's say somebody's producing a 10 cycle per second (CPS) wave, even though that's just the way we talk about it in the brain - the number of neural firings; but if we took an audio signal that was a multiple of that, so that they're producing 10 (cps), and you transfer that up into the audio range, so it's 20 cps or 40 cps.
And then you fed that back with the idea that perhaps one harmonic would enhance the other so it would make it not only pleasant to hear but it would also help amplify the wave a little and make it easier for people to produce.
So that was where I started with the idea; and then I thought, "Well, we should look across the spectrum and see if there's also harmonics present."
So I did some research on that and discovered that there is, in fact, evidence of harmonics occurring in brainwaves. So I thought, "Well, let's see if we can do this."
So somebody comes in with an amplitude of 5 cps, and then we look and see, is there a 10 and a 20? And (we) try and gate that and feed all those tones back so people were getting an actual musical representation of what's going on.
Because I was a musician for, like, 25 years, I got this call from people in LA who had a studio that I had done a lot with in the past. They were a downtown Hollywood orchestral studio. So, in the prime time of movie and television within Hollywood, they were probably the hottest in town. We did, like, "Dallas," and all these different shows, and tons of movies, tons of movies ... with Oscars and gold records all over the place. Since Hollywood sort of spread out to the perifery - lots of people were recording in the valley or Culver City - so the studio was sitting there with a lot of open time.
So they said, you come down, use it, the time is yours.
I came across binaural and all those kinds of technologies, and decided that my belief was, as a musician, that asking the brain to try to resolve the mistuned beats ... the brain comes up with something you believe to be real ... why not give it something real rather than fool it like that?
I then tried to see if we couldn't bring it down in a way and then very accurately and precisely link it together so that, right brain, left brain, both were getting precisely synchronized beats, but that we could change the emphasis that was there in the mix. So we could drive a little bit more of one frequency of harmonics in one place and another over on the other side.
So that's what we were going to try to do.
What we did then was figure out our very precise tones where we wanted them, and then take those tones and hand-edit them so that we got them down into the range of the brain. I took them ... and edited them all, and then we brought them back to the studio and ran it from the computer through ProTools on to 24-track tape and then mixed it in analog on 24-track tape. ...
The mixes were incredible, I mean, they were really incredible. What was really interesting was watching what happened when people came in the room. Y'know, I had been in there ... I was like Gumby in there, listening for all these hours to all these tones, and people would come in and one would say, "Oh, I can't be in here; that gives me the willies."
And someone else would come in and say, "oh, I like that!"
So there was a definite different reaction in people.
I thought that pretty well correlated with the idea with the way the phenomena had spread in the pilot study, where some people had sensate experiences, some people having deep hypnogogic imagery, some people having memory recall. I think maybe we're stirring or shaking up different parts in people. If there's a resistance in one area and this tone comes in, and they get the willies, they may need some work on that. And then for other people where it's just really relaxed, it's a way for them to just drop in deeply.
So the idea came that I would develop this whole grouping as a kind of therapeutic system. So people can use it on their own, but I want to also take it into an actual therapeutic approach.

Is creativity the focus of Vantage Quest? That's what you talk about a lot on on the liner notes.

Well, there are two important aspects to this question. The first one is, yes, it focuses on creativity, and I'll tell you why. The second one is, What does creativity mean to me?
When I initially developed the idea, it was coming out of the high-amplitude waves down around the Theta-Alpha border. It's something that's associated with, well, it happens in shamanic drumming ... that's how shamans reach their altered states to do what they do.
It also turns out to be something that appears when people have the "aha" experience.
I first started doing workshops using shamanic drumming as a way to help people reach a deeper creative place. So this came after that, as a way to take that one step further. The initial way I looked at this was, this is a way to put that kind of driving in place to help people access deeper parts of their creative ability.
So the pilot study that I did was a control group came and took a creativty test, waited 2-3 weeks, tested them again. The test group used Vantage Quest for that time, did pre-testing and post-testing. Well, in fact, there were some changes. Some people came up significantly in their scores. But some didn't.
That was when I noticed that there were all these other things that happened. Some people became very creative, but other people seemed to have these interesting body changes happen. ... That was sort of the first focus, to get a tool for people to dive in more deeply.
Now, my view of creativity is that it's the only thing going on here. That we have sort of isolated a part of it that we define as creativity, and we call it the arts or innovation in science. But it isn't different ... like the beginning of the (VQ recording) says, it isn't different than a tree growing in sunlight or two molecules bonding or an atom being iron instead of neon. It's all about this attraction and balance that's going on of dualities that hold form. Somewhere beyond that is the formless, and what's going on where we exist in the Universe is this creation of form, or holding the point of tension, as the mystics would say.
If you're going to change people's abiltiy to receive their connection with the universe, y'know, creativity is as good a model for it as I can think of. And that's true whether you're trying to heal, and you're using that state to do complimentary visualization about the healing process or you're trying to be intuitive about a problem you're solving, or come up with the next big idea of whatever you're doing. It's learning about getting the ego out of the way, the mind quiet, the ears open and the heart open, and let it go.

Bergquist is working on additional CDs like the first one, Vantage Quest VI, in his basement studio, if he can keep from "destroying my computer in frustration."
It takes very intense signal processing, he said.
"You have tones that start and stop, just on, off, on, off, many, many times a second."
Normal audio gear isn't built for that, he said. He had to really work to eliminate pops and blips in the final mix.
Now he's moved to an all-digital system. His current set-up is very "high-powered stuff," he said. This kind of recording is extremely dense.
Look for more from Bergquist in the way of more Vantage Quest CDs, as well as a book that he released recently called "The Coyote Oak: Burgeoning Wisdom." It's a novel about what happens when dreams and reality collide.
" 'James,' a road-worn refugee from the music scene, and his wife, 'Andrea,' are struggling to find purpose, withdrawing to the country after snatching failure from the brink of success. Pushed to the edge of sanity by extraordinary visions inexplicably mauled into reality, they run heart-first through a gauntlet of mystical encounters, conflicts with corporate greed, and a paradoxical, otherworldly shamanic being who unveils a world of healing reaching far beyond them."
(from a description of the novel, published by Reality Press.)