If you have children who are reluctant to take music lessons, there’s new research to suggest you keep encouraging them.

Even if they never go on to play Roy Thomson Hall, music lessons provide benefits that go far beyond the keyboard.

Researchers have discovered that childhood music training helps the brain develop better neurological responses to sound, which in turn improves the ability to learn.

What this study adds to the existing knowledge is how long you have to take lessons to gain those benefits. The researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago looked at people who had taking music lessons for various lengths of time as children and found even a year of study will produce profound benefits in all areas of learning, including better reading ability.

The study appears in the latest edition of the journal Neuroscience