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By Jack Beresford
Senior Reporter
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A woman didn't know what to think after finding her baby lying in her playpen in the most unusual of ways.
Candace Piccirillo found her 9-month-old's pose so strange she decided she had to capture it on camera, with the resulting footage posted to TikTok, under the handle gripesandgiggles, where it has gotten a big reaction.
At the time of writing, the video has been watched a staggering 7 million times. That's not bad going for a clip captured at 10 a.m. on an otherwise ordinary weekday morning.
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"She was in her playpen and I looked over at her and that's how she was laying and when she heard me she turned her head and looked at me," Piccirillo told Newsweek.
"When I saw her like that she looked like a doll laying there and I thought it was funny."
Cute baby content is a force to be reckoned with on social media. According to Morten L. Kringelbach, associate professor and senior research fellow in neuroscience, University of Oxford, however, the feeling of cuteness goes beyond the purely visual.
"It works by involving all the senses and strongly attracting our attention by sparking rapid brain activity," he explained in an article published on the Oxford University website. Babies are a prime example of this.
"Babies not only look cute, with their big eyes, chubby cheeks and button noses, their infectious laughs and captivating scent also make them sound and smell cute. Their soft skin and chubby limbs may even make them feel cute," Kringelbach explained.
"Together, these aesthetic qualities act as a crucial mechanism that enables babies to attract us through all our senses. Babies need constant attention and care to survive, and cuteness is one of the main ways they get it."
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But while Piccirillo's daughter is undeniably cute, the popularity of this particular video of her also appears to be rooted in the strange sense of otherness her pose in the playpen creates in the mind.
Piccirillo is "not sure why" the video has taken off like it has but notes her daughter is "always doing funny things that make us laugh." She did, however, observe many people having a similar reaction to her, and some taking it a step further than that.
"Lots of people say she looks like a broken doll," Piccirillo said, which is something she also wrote alongside the video. There's another common response among the comments posted alongside the clip: that her daughter is AI.
"I'm surprised at the amount of people who think she is AI," Piccirillo said. "So many comments are saying that. On Instagram the video has 1.2million views and lots on there as well are saying the same thing."
Not that Piccirillo is especially bothered by the claim. She's already taken steps to dispel any suggestion of it being true, but it hasn't quite got through to some viewers. "It made me laugh so I made a follow up video to show she's not AI but people are still saying that," she said.
Conspiracy theorists aside, this will all make for an amusing, if slightly unusual, story to tell her daughter when she's older.
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