Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for implementing a reservoir computing neural network. In one aspect there is provided a reservoir computing neural network comprising: (i) a brain emulation sub-network, and (ii) a prediction sub-network. The brain emulation sub-network is configured to process the network input in accordance with values of a plurality of brain emulation sub-network parameters to generate an alternative representation of the network input. The prediction sub-network is configured to process the alternative representation of the network input in accordance with values of a plurality of prediction sub-network parameters to generate the network output. The values of the brain emulation sub-network parameters are determined before the reservoir computing neural network is trained and are not adjusting during training of the reservoir computing neural network.