As a psychological state, pain is perceived by the affected individual and it corresponds to a form of conscious awareness as a subjective conscious experience mediated in part by beliefs or emotions. Regardless of its 'physical' origins, pain, like all other perceptions, is a mental experience at different degrees of consciousness. The experience of pain requiring a stimulus, a feeling or emotion, and an effect or result, consists of an intermingling of chemical, biological, psychological, physiologic, socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic backgrounds, and emotional and cognitive factors. Not only the activation but also the connections are involved in conscious pain perception

pain perception, consciousness, pain experience, pain matrix