also known as a feed-forward neural network as an input layer hidden layer and output layer how do we get a feed-forward neural network to be able to use previous information to affect later ones what have we had a loop in a neural network that can pass previous information forward and that's essentially what a recurrent neural network does an RNN has a looping mechanism that acts as a highway to allow information to flow from one step to the next this information is the hidden state which is a representation