MindGap: A Conversational AI Framework for Upstream Neuroplastic Intervention in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Abstract
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is fundamentally a neuroplastic problem traumatic contact events encode over-reactive neural pathways through Hebbian long-term potentiation, producing hair-triggered amygdala-HPA stress cascades that fire before conscious awareness can intercept them. Existing therapeutic approaches, prolonged exposure, EMDR, cognitive behavioural therapy, operate predominantly downstream of the reactive cascade, teaching patients to tolerate or reframe distress after it has arisen. While clinically valuable, these suppression-based approaches do not produce the upstream pathway dissolution that constitutes lasting structural neural reorganisation. This paper proposes MindGap, a privacy-preserving on-device conversational AI framework that delivers structured neuroplastic rehabilitation for PTSD through the practice of dependent origination, a Buddhist psychological framework that identifies the precise moment between the pre-cognitive affective signal and the reactive elaboration that follows as the site of therapeutic intervention. MindGap guides patients through three progressive layers of observation at this feeling tone gap: noticing the bare affective signal before reactive elaboration, recognising it as self-arising rather than caused by the stimulus, and recognising the conditioned implicit belief beneath the feeling. Each layer corresponds to progressively deeper prefrontal regulatory engagement and progressively deeper long-term depression-mediated weakening of the reactive pathway, producing genuine upstream dissolution rather than downstream suppression. Running entirely on-device with no data egress, MindGap delivers daily calibrated exposure sessions through a fine-tuned lightweight large language model, making it deployable in sensitive clinical and military contexts where cloud-based solutions are not permitted.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.14660,
title = {MindGap: A Conversational AI Framework for Upstream Neuroplastic Intervention in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder},
author = {Eranga Bandara and Ross Gore and Asanga Gunaratna and Ravi Mukkamala and Nihal Siriwardanagea and Sachini Rajapakse and Isurunima Kularathna and Pramoda Karunarathna and Wathsala Herath and Chalani Rajapakse and Sachin Shetty and Anita H. Clayton and Christopher K. Rhea and Ng Wee Keong and Kasun De Zoysa and Amin Hass and Shaifali Kaushik and Preston Samuel and Atmaram Yarlagadda},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14660},
year = {2026}
}