In this article, a model describing the activation dynamics of bidirectional associative memory (BAM) neural networks involving transmission delays was considered. The concept of BAM networks employed in this work is improved and it includes the earlier notions known in the literature and is applied to a wider class of networks. Further, we introduced a new notion, as a measure of restoring stability and termed it as a dead zone. In this article, the influence of the presence of dead zones on the global asymptotic stability of the equilibrium pattern was investigated. Existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium pattern under fairly general and easily verifiable conditions were also established.