Leila Etaati has a new series on neural nets in R:
in Neural Network, we have some hidden Nodes that do the main job ! they found the best value for the output, they are using some function that we call that functions as “Activation function” for instance in below picture, Node C is a hidden node that take the values from node A and B. as you can see the weight (the better path) related to Node B as shown in tick line that means Node B may lead to get better results so Node C get input values from Node B not Node A.
If you have time, also check out the linked YouTube videos.