system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: If the sensation of "pain" in the body is produced by the activation of nerves, how can one person describe differing "types" of pain when, no matter the injury, it's the same nerves being stimulated?

ELI5: If the sensation of "pain" in the body is produced by the activation of nerves, how can one person describe differing "types" of pain when, no matter the injury, if it's the same nerves being stimulated?
gpt
It's *not* the same nerves being stimulated.

Pain comes, essentially, in three major types (but there are different "feelings" of pain within each type).  There's pain derived from overstimulated sensory nerves, there's pain from nociceptors (that's nerve-endings that are *specific* to detecting damage and reporting it as pain) being stimulated *at all*, and there's pain that doesn't correspond to a stimulus at all and originates inside the nervous system.

You've asked about the first of those, but you should be aware of the other two as well; these are still pain, and the last sometimes has nothing to do with sensory receptor neurons at all.

There are quite a few different sorts of sensory receptor neurons in the body, and each of them provides a potentially different pain-sensation when overloaded, just as they provide different sensations when working normally.