The paper deals with the stability and bifurcation analysis of a class of simplified five-neuron bidirectional associative memory neural networks with four delays. By discussing the characteristic transcendental equation and applying Hopf bifurcation theory, some sufficient conditions which guarantee the local stability and the existence of Hopf bifurcation of the neural networks are established. With the aid of the normal form theory and center manifold theory, we obtain some specific formulae to determine the stability and the direction of th...