As far as I'm aware, attention does not even attempt biological plausibility, nor was it in any way inspired by biology.

It may not have been the intention, but associative memory is the one of the only mechanisms that computational neuroscientists can agree on broadly. There's been recent work on energy-based models that suggest biologically plausible methods adjacent to attention. [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06996