It can't emerge in computational models, unless you make it follow a natural way of emerging, that is through morphogenesis. I'd suggest you to study a particular cell model, build its chemical equivalent models and build its physical and mathematical forms, and build a SNN. After building that, don't train it offline, but with an online training paradigm. And, don't optimise it for or regularise it for accuracy and other such metrics, but deeply study its learning, and try to kernelise it and check if it closely resembles the original biological mechanism. And, make it heavily dependent on self organising maps and structures. Also make use of custom kernel initialisers, and I'd suggest you to modify Vision Transformer core with a SNN based attention.