  Humans have long been fascinated by how memories are formed, how they can be
damaged or lost, or still seem vibrant after many years. Thus the search for
the locus and organization of memory has had a long history, in which the
notion that is is composed of distinct systems developed during the second half
of the 20th century. A fundamental dichotomy between conscious and unconscious
memory processes was first drawn based on evidences from the study of amnesiac
subjects and the systematic experimental work with animals. The use of
behavioral and neural measures together with imaging techniques have
progressively led researchers to agree in the existence of a variety of neural
architectures that support multiple memory systems. This article presents a
historical lens with which to contextualize these idea on memory systems, and
provides a current account for the multiple memory systems model.
