Meditation, in it's highest form, is equivalent to sleep with awareness. Neuroscience already has indicated that sleep has something do with our information gathering system[1]. So in that sense meditation should help you to organize thoughts over time.
When I was in grad school, I worked out a procedure for solving my homework problems in my sleep.
I thought this was my imagination, that it was purely coincidence that the solutions to my problem sets would come to me in the mornings, but my psychotherapist assured me it was real. Elsewhere I have read that one function of sleep, for humans anyway, is that it enables us to solve problems.
They key is to work very, very hard at solving the problem before sleeping. It's insufficient to just read the problem, or tinker around with it a little.
However it also doesn't work to beat at the problem so hard that I stay up all night without sleeping.
I'm afraid that I didn't clue into this until _graduate_ school. As an undergrad I quite commonly didn't start my problem sets until the night before they were due.
