 On the other hand, the maximum total correlation (for a fixed set of individual entropies formula_17) is given by

and occurs when one of the variables determines "all" of the other variables.The variables are then maximally related in the sense that knowing the value of one variable provides complete information about the values of all the other variables, and the variables can be figuratively regarded as "cogs," in which the position of one cog determines the positions of all the others (Rothstein 1952).It is important to note that the total correlation counts up "all" the redundancies among a set of variables, but that these redundancies may be distributed throughout the variable set in a variety of complicated ways (Garner 1962).